Lost my cable, now 56k can i tune a 56k

well my wife convinced me to buy a new house, however there is no High Speed ISP in the are yet so i am reduced to 56k for a while.

So i go out and buy the best damn 56k modem i can find. US robotic Performance Pro http://www.usr.com/products/home/home-product.asp?sku=USR5610B . This thing even has a gaming mode. sound good but so far i still get spikey pings and redjacks.

Anyone got recommendations (turn compression off, turn error checking off etc...) or anyone else know if this gaming mode actually does anything so far after 2 days of playing with it on and off i really see no difference.

USR has a history of making modems out to be alot more complicated and feature-rich than they are. Just from past experience I would lean towards that being a big sack of shit.

Hope the house/wife is worth the lack of broadband yo

download a huge file from some fast site, and watch the modem status. you know, double click the modem's connection in the lower right, and watch the incoming/outgoing bytes. does it stop and resume every now and then? if so, your phone line is probably noisy and causing your modem to retrain (renegotiate the connection speed). when that happens, you can neither send nor receive data, which would explain the redjacks. sometimes the retrain is very fast, so you get a stutter in the game. sometimes it takes many seconds so you get a redjack.

let me know if that is the case and i'll give you a sequence of commands to punch into the modem to force a lower connection speed so that it might be more stable at least.

s32=64

Turn off v.92/v.90 etc. Go for a v.34 so the modem isnt sitting there trying to compress data when you game. It wont produce great results, but its a tad better for gaming. Takes a 300 ping to about a 200-250 ping.

Doh, just saw the suggestions about crappy lines.... yep, well, I'd still suggest a v.34 connection still the same.

v.90 and v.92 aren't compression. they're ways of negotiating the line connection. protocols. so are v32, v32bis and v34.

compression protocols are v.42bis and MNP5, and those can be disabled for gaming.

v42 is data correction.

it's been a while since i dealt with modems, so my knowledge could be off a bit.

anyways, connecting at 28.8 (or even 33.6) as opposed to a 56k connection increases your ping by about 30ms, give or take. it'd be better if he forced the connection speed of his modem to something a few notches below his current connect speed, assuming this is indeed his problem.

Thanks guys, i'll give it a shot when i get a chance and let you know. I'm still busy unpacking and stuff. God damnit where did i pack my circular saw :/ .

Merlock, Not sure if the new house is worth it but the attitude on the wife sure is .

well still have not had much time to test things but i will tell you this for sure.... USR Game Mode = redjacking with the default setup.

Yes it seems to lower my ping but then i redjack constantly. Its better to play with it off. Hopefully this weekend i will get a chance to try connecting at lower speeds and see how that goes.