I've got a problem here that I would like to see if anyone has encountered, or has anything I should check.

My father lives about 5 miles from my house. I have T1-speed DSL at my house. Where he lives, is a broadband deadspot. Cable company wont give him cable, and telephone company wont give him DSL, and the wireless internet company in our area says there isn't a line-of-sight to their tower, so he can't get that either. Basically, dial-up or nothing.

Both he and I are running Windows XP. We both have 56K modems. (I have verefied this)

Through Windows XP, I have set up my computer to accept incoming connections via the telephone line. I made a separate username and password for my father, allowed him a remote connection to it, and allowed him access to the LAN so that he could get to the Internet.

From his house, I went into the dial-up account setup wizard and manually set up my connection. I put in my phone number, his username, and his password. Everything went in smoothly. The problem is, when he connects to my house, he only connects at, or near, 26.4kbps. Every time.

As I said before, I have verefied that both he and I have a 56K modem. I would think that with us being only a few miles apart, we are running off of the same switch at the telephone company, which I would have guessed would have made the connection that much faster. Yet it connects at only 26k every time. When I had dial-up as my ISP, I never connected as consistently as what he connects to mine. I also realize that a 56K modem will realistically only connect at the high 47Ks usually.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to why it is connecting so consistently at such a slow speed? Or do you know of anything I can do to make it faster? It shows that it already has some compression on the packets. Is there a 3rd party program I can use to compress the transmitted data more?

The only thing that I could come up with, as a possible solution, is that the telephone company is somehow limiting it, since it is a voice line, either through some device in-line, or from the physical wiring to my father's house being old and not able to handle faster speeds. Neither of which seemed like they could be possible since you can use 56K dialup to another ISP and have it connect much faster.

Does anyone have any suggestions or things I should check?

Thanks,
Joey Phillips
http://www.apartment3wifi.com