Quote Originally Posted by NewGuy
I have an advanced degree in math. So people believe me in such calculatations.....
You may have an advanced degree in math. I only have an education in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and thirty some years of work experience in computers, mostly focusing on networking and real time process control. But no one has ever downloaded a knoppix iso on a dial-up modem overnight. I've been working with modems since the days of 100 baud and 300 baud modems, and I know very well the hard and fast limitations of a 56k modem.

rrfish72 actually had the perfect solution. He said "Don't believe me then". I'm certainly willing to take that advice, and I would suggest that others do too.

As to your "story", it was certainly light on facts and even numbers for a story about math. Do you even know what the real download speed of your line is? There are plenty of ways to measure it, but your story seemed to imply that you do not. Perhaps your ISP simply raised the capacity and you didn't find out (many cable systems, for example, were marketed at 1.5 megabit but were later upgrader to 3 megabit. And the Cable company did not announce this until the upgrade was complete, although many users noticed this as it happened. There is another massive upgrade in progress now to 4.5 gig.) And, of course, there are people working with uncapped modems, as the basic cable system is capable of considerably more but the cable operators tell the modems what speed to limit themselves to. But none of that has much bearing on what can be done with a 56k dial up modem. After all, if your SDSL line is actually twice as fast as what you are paying for, a telco mistake perhaps, as you seem to think, how does that in any way change the upper limit of what a 56k dial-up modem can do? It doesn't change it one bit! It has nothing to do with what we are talking about. There are things that can be done to help dial-up (like compression can be applied to the connection), but these have their limits, and no one is moving 700 megByte of Knoppix iso file across a dial-up connection overnight, and even you're "I get twice what I expect" story doesn't really change that, or come close to the speed improvement one would need to make the overnight story work. Take rrfish72 's solution.