the 56k stands for 56KBit/s. What you were seeing was 3.5 KByte/s which of course is still way off the theoretical 7 KByte/s you could achieve with 56KBit/s. I

the 56k stands for 56KBit/s. What you were seeing was 3.5 KByte/s which of course is still way off the theoretical 7 KByte/s you could achieve with 56KBit/s. If you only got 3 KBit/s over a 56K modem, your download-rate would have been 375 bytes/s - a third of a Kilobyte per second. That's a bit more than what you could have reached with a 2400 baud modem from the eighties. You get to your 10 months result by dividing the 10 Gigs by 3Kbit/s, while you would probably have ment to divide by Kbyte/s http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10GB+%2F+3KBps http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10GB+%2F+3KBps 38 days.