Whats the difference between data throughput and modem speed?
Modem speed (or more accurately line speed) is generally regarded as the rate at which a modem is connected to another modem. Throughput is the amount of data transferred over a period of time. For example, I usually have a stable connection to the internet at 44,000bps (bits per second). My ISP’s modem ‘talks’ to my modem at 44,000bps for the duration of the call. When I download my 56K test page from my ISP’s server I transfer the data in around 6 seconds, which is about 41,600bps or 5,200 bytes per second (or characters per second). This is my throughput. The different is due to overheads incurred from protocols, error correction etc. When I download a file from a server across the internet at a busy time of the day I may find that I download a 180K(bytes) zip file in 3 minutes. This is a throughput of 1,000 bytes per second, but, my modem is still ‘talking’ to my ISP’s modem at 44,000bps. It is worth pointing out that the throughput in this case is lower, because the data arrives i
