Dial-up modems

I had to switch to dial-up until my new external modem DSL is enabled.

Bought a new Creative Broadxent V.92/V.90 modem. The thing would only connect at about 30k. Installed an updated driver and still could only get about 30k. Took forever to load 8 windows in two browsers on my dual monitor setup.

I couldn't understand it as I always got 48-53k before I went to DSL.

So I finally found the driver disk to the old Lucent WinModem I've got and physically installed it. XP didn't even ask for the disk, it just installed a generic Lucent driver and immediately connected at 50.6k.

Much better, takes about half the time to load the 8 windows.

So, why the difference in these two modems?