It's quite some time since I dealt directly with modems and packets moving over networks per se so some of this may well prove wrong - feel free to point it out if I am someone.
> 3. But surely, ASDL, cable, the backbone and decent > intranets must all do hardware compression, don't they? Or > are they secretly not very keen on decreasing network traffic? Perhaps there's an element of confusion in technologies. A modem is an analogue device. It converts a digital signal into an analogue one to transfer it over a phone line as audio. As such, it is capable of being compressed due to the nature of the signal (being audio and all). A digital network link (which includes ISDN, ADSL and the backbone link stuff) is just that - a digital link. No conversion to analogue takes place. On a digital link you're moving packets of data. I doubt there's much scope of a packet of data that would typically be under 1k in size (going purely from memory here and quite happy to be told otherwise). Different technologies involve different concepts basically. CYA, Dave -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php