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It's kinda embarrassing to ask, actually, but what kind of modem is the best?

I'm not asking about ASDL or ISDN (or whatever), as I'm living in a rented house with only BT available (I hate them). I'm currently using external 33.6 (I think. I'm posting from my office.) modem, and it's slow. Internal modem is much cheaper, and I wonder if that's faster than external one, providing it's same speed from same company. Also, is the USB connected external modem is faster than conventional one? I'm terribly confused.

Thanks in advance.

Whichever modem you go for, it is worth remembering that they are only as fast as the line you use. BT analogue lines transfer at about 44k

Before I went over to ADSL, I used a £20 internal PCI modem and regularly connected at 44k.

Most internal modems are PCI or ISA bus, both of which have significatly slower throughput than USB, but are faster than serial or parallel port arcitecture.

So the question becomes: what kind of external modem do you have? If you have a USB modem, then you're better off going through an external modem. Plus, you're not tying up a slot on your motherboard (a precious commodity if you have a micro-ATX form factor board).

If your external modem connects through a parallel or serial port, I'd say get an internal PCI modem because you're not only having to deal with a slow connection speed with your ISP, but the data are moving slowly from the modem to your computer.

As Yshania says, the bottom line is that a dial-up connection is going to be slow, and you may not notice an appreciable difference in performance if you have an internal v.90 PCI modem or an external v.90 USB modem, so the deciding issue will probably be price.

Modems are cheap; you can get a good name-brand modem from retailers for $30-50 (USD), so get the best one you can afford.

I've got external serial port modem. So, USB connection is the fastest, internal second, then.

What about v.90 and v.92? I've seen those but what's the difference?

Here's the long answer:

When 56K modems first came out, there were two standards for the modem protocols: X2 and K56-flex (I think one was developed by Motorola and the other by US Robotics/3Com). In response, the industry adopted the v.90 standard that was backwards compatible for both X2 and K56 modems, as well as all of the new 56K modems.

Recently the new v.92 standard was adopted to streamline some of the protocols, and all v.92 hardware should be backwards-compatible with older 56K systems. You can read more about v.92 here.