Found a trick to speed up my dial-up by stacking two 56k modems

Back in '98 I was pulling my hair out trying to download a 10 MB game demo over a single 56k modem. Took like 4 hours and always disconnected halfway through. Then my buddy showed me how to hook up two modems to separate phone lines and use a program called Midpoint to combine them. It actually doubled my speed to around 9-10 KB/s and the downloads finished in under 2 hours. Anyone else ever try multi-link dial-up or am I just showing my age here lol?

2 comments

2 Comments

ross.jason1mo ago

I read somewhere that the theoretical max for a 56k modem was actually 53k due to FCC rules on power limits for phone lines. So yeah, one modem was never going to give you the full 56k. I remember a friend from a tech forum in 1999 saying he used a dual modem setup with an ISDN line as a third channel, which was wild. He claimed it pushed his downloads to like 12 KB/s, but I never had the money or the phone lines to try that myself. Sounds like you got about what was realistic for the time.

the_henry1mo ago

Whoa, hold up, I gotta call you out on that speed claim though. Stacking two 56k modems would get you around 9-10 KB/s total, which is what you said, but those old modems were actually limited to 53k or so by the phone lines. Even at 56k theoretical, one modem is only about 7 KB/s max, so two would be around 14 KB/s tops, not really 9-10 KB/s. I ran a dual modem setup for a year and always hit around 8-9 KB/s, so you were probably getting the real world numbers right. Did you ever use Dr. TCP or a similar tweak to squeeze out a tiny bit more speed?