[thepostman0]

Some v92 "winmodems" were more glorified sound cards so needed CPU. If the PC was busy, sonetithe line could drop. A 33.6 would be hardware, so there could be a time when slower becomes faster due to CPU load.

All external 56k modems were hardware, some people wouldn't risk an internal card for fear of ending up with a driver based device.

Ah good ol' days of BBS and wvdial for internet.

[aidenn0]

I actually had both a V.90 and V.92 external modem. V.90 was limited to 33.6k upload, and rarely exceeded 50k in download. The side sending at "up to 56k" needed to have a digital connection to the telco (in theory ISDN, but ISPs would have trunk lines usually).

I'm not sure I knew this at the time (if I did, I had forgotten it by now), but V.92 actually did allow sending at up to 48kbits from an analog line. This was usually not used because it would lower the rate coming from the other direction, and l̶e̶e̶c̶h̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶g̶o̶t̶t̶a̶ ̶l̶e̶e̶c̶h̶ most people cared more about downstream.

[iso1631]

The first 56k modems were download at 56k, upload at 33.6. In theory that was the same upload speed as a 33.6k modem, but I guess line quality could have caused some issue with the higher download baudrate meaning that the upload suffered (say getting 45 down 28 up)

It wasn't until 2000 that upload got upto 48k (still not the full 56k on the download). I moved to cable/dsl in late 1999 so didn't go beyond 56/33.6

[DropInIn]

God, that was only 23 years ago....

But God damn, I was already a teen and that was 23 years ago.... Getting old kinda sucks....

[rasz]

Physical upload never went over 36.6, higher numbers you saw was MNP 5/V.42bis/ V.44 compression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ITU-T_V-series_recomme...

[iso1631]

V.92 apparently brought in 48kbit uploads

[justsomehnguy]

> due to CPU load

Or you get the damned Lucent/Agere drivers mess the things and transfer garbage instead of data. I still has some mp3s with garbled parts from these times and with 128kbps it's quite audible.