what is the fastest speed i can recieve on my phone line?

This can depend on so many factors.... Type of cable (copper?, fiber?), distance to closest switching centre, infrastructure at your closest switching centre, number of neighbours sharing the same wire for DSL etc.

It's nearly impossible to say what maximum speed you can get without knowing anything about your phone line. I read that BT are trialing 21meg - in a village near Cardiff... it is supposed to be 8meg ..the top speed .. My fastest so far has been 5meg ..at home I often drop to 2meg.

I hear Cable Companies promising alsorts of lightning Speeds but I doubt it.. Based on what type of wiring up to a 50mbps. that is 100x DSL speed on an analog modem you can get 53kbps down and up (no it's not 56k, phone lines are regulated for a max of 53k/s only even tho your modem can go just a little bit faster). divide that by 8 to get the speed in Kilobytes per second. It depends on the media it travels across and what kind of associated equiptment you want to buy. You can purchase a

T-1 circuit and they are rated a 1.544 Mbps. Not sure wether you can get a T-3 or bigger from a phone company to your house (if you can you probably dont wanna pay that much) Usually most people will get a partial T-1 which is about 56kbps. Or 128k isdn line. You can also get DSL and ADSL across your phone line, but then it really depends on the quality and distance of the cable between you and your service provider. Sascha, you are on the money except for one thing:

DSL subscribers do NOT share bandwidth. That's the big difference between DSL (high speed phone company internet) and Cable TV internet. Cable TV users SHARE their bandwidth, since everyone's cable is delivered via the same line, but every phone line has it's own dedicated 'pair' of wires. No sharing. All yours. ;-)

Polly it depends where you are? call your provider and ask them to check!!!

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