Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!aplcen!haven!purdue!bu-cs!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!ukc!axion!planet!usenet
From: cag@tigger.planet.bt.co.uk (Chris Green,SSTF,5788,)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems
Subject: Re: Microcom Modems.....Are they any good?
Message-ID: <1989Dec8.090429.21867@planet.bt.co.uk>
Date: 8 Dec 89 09:04:29 GMT
References: <1989Dec4.054323.9528@larouch.uucp>
Sender: usenet@planet.bt.co.uk (Usenet News Manager)
Reply-To: cag@tigger.planet.bt.co.uk
Organization: RT511, BT Research Labs, Martlesham Heath, Ipswich, UK
Lines: 19

From article <1989Dec4.054323.9528@larouch.uucp>, by jparnas@larouch.UUCP (Jacob Parnas):
[lots deleted]
> The reason that we use the Microcom's is they have the best compression 
> currently around and you hook them up to your computer at 38400 baud.  I've
> seen up to 33000 baud true throughput cating a file like /etc/hosts.  You
> won't get that from a T2500.
> 
I hate to be pedantic but that's *not* 33000 baud, it's 33000 bits per
second (=bps).  The highest possible *baud* rate on public switched
telephone lines is somewhere around 2400 baud full duplex.  The reason
that you can get much greater than 2400 bits per second is that a baud
is a 'change of state' per second and with clever encoding each change
of state transmits more than one bit of information.  In addition of
course compression techniques reduce the actual number of bits one has
to transmit.  I would be much happier if we could all use *characters*
per second (or bytes maybe but that starts with 'b' unfortunately) to
quote actual data transmission rates.

Chris Green