I couldn't even get 33.6k to work on my wiring. The house wasn't that old but was old enough that the wiring was abysmal. You could easily understand conversa

I couldn't even get 33.6k to work on my wiring. The house wasn't that old but was old enough that the wiring was abysmal. You could easily understand conversations happening on one phone line from the other line. When someone was on the other line, I'd get a re-negotiate and sometimes drop to 21.6k (a reliable minimum just before I had broadband installed). Those things were returned like crazy when I worked at CompUSA. I had never met a customer who had made one connect at 56K[0] and none of the staff -- all serious computer-nerds who spent much of their income at the store -- could get a 56K connection to anything. I believe, also, that 33.6K is the speed you will get when you are connecting to another modem (ala a typical BBS). I'm foggy on the details, but my understanding is that to negotiate 56K, the other end of the conversation has to be digital[1]. [0] Admittedly, I quit before I had broadband and 56K was relatively new; maybe it got better, but I stopped paying attention. [1] I did work in telecom, so I am cringing a little because I know that -- at a minimum -- that's a somewhat ridiculous over-simplification of several different things that I had regular, though casual, exposure to way too long ago to speak intelligently about, now.