dial-up modem speed question

[pokerswami]

I'm using a brand new Dell computer and its built in dial-up modem. When I sign on to AOL, the sign on window shows the connection speed, usually 40000, 42666 or 44000. My old Windows 95, 166Mhz machine with its add-in card modem using AOL 6.0 used to indicate 56K at sign-on.

Was this because the old software just automatically showed the highest theoretical connection speed instead of the actual speed?

Also, is there any way for me to see how fast my connection is actually working at any particular moment, as some times it seems to slow down, and I'd like to be able to check to see what is actually happening, communication speed-wise?

Thanks for your help.

[Kablooie]

So it is entirely possible that both pieces of software are, or were lying about the connection speed, but i would put (a small) amount of money on it being the older one. Although that's a rather strange bunch of speeds to be getting - AOL dial-up speeds used to depend rather heavily on which dialup router you connected too, and that would give you differences on 10-20k or more. Those don't look like hardware type increments though - so my best guess would be that the new software may be measuring the actual speed of the connection. You would be unlikely to get 56k except under optimum conditions, (read carefully prepared test data), since part of that speed is coming from data compression.

You can get a pretty good feel for the state of the network between you and any given site using the traceroute command, tracert from the dos command line in its Windows manifestation, which will show you the intermediate hops and speeds. Similarly the ping command will give you actual speed to any given site.