I've heard that TPCs (The Phone Companies) are required to provide fax service.
Not on residential lines. Some business-grade services include QoS (quality of service) contracts that guarentee faxing tho. Besides, V.17 is only 14,400 bps and V.29 is 9,600 bps. Those speeds are a joke compared to V.90. :)
The telephone companies (local exchange carriers) are required by FCC regulation to provide residential service that meets certain performance specifications; basically a set of noise levels. If your line meets or is quieter than those specs, it will be able to maintain full speed V.90 connections[*].
Some LECs offer a "quietization" service, for a buck or two extra per month, which makes what they call a "data line" or "conditioned line". This is prohibited in many states... because it's a scam. The "conditioned" lines simply conform to the original FCC specs!
Newer or upgraded phone service will likely have a demarcation point with a modular phone connection. Your house phone service is plugged into this jack (with a short cable). The point of this is you can unplug your house and plug in a phone here. If you have problems with the signal here then it's a phone company problem and they need to fix it.
Use a good quality wired phone for this test. Press a single key (not 1 or 0) to get rid of the dial-tone, then listen... The line should be absolutely silent. If, at this point, you hear ANY noise, static, clicking, crosstalk, etc, call the phone company and make them fix it. Be pushy. Be firm. Be persistant. And don't pay for the service call! Getting rid of that noise is a legally mandated repair, on their dime!
Of course, if the line is dead quiet, then you need to isolate what device (phone, answering machine, etc) or line (in your walls) is causing the noise... The phone company will do this debug for you, for $$$.
[*] full speed V.90 connections. Ug. I hate that phrase. V.90 is an adaptive protocol that covers everything from 4,800 bps through 64,000 bps (artificially limited to 56,000 bps in the USA). "Adaptive" is the key. The modem reports to you the initial carrier speed (which is the only thing that Apple shows you!), then 15 seconds later reevaluates the connection and dynamically adjusts it up or down depending on the error rate (line noise). Periodically, if the error rate changes, the modem will then automatically "retrain" to speed up or slow down the carrier. Figure that if your modem reports a speed of 26,400 bps or faster at that initial connection, you're doing fine. About the only way to diagnose further is to run some real loop tests, without PPP, because Apple doesn't permit you to interrupt the PPP socket to query the modem's error counters.
FWIW, - Dan.
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