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The most time-consuming part is tracking down drivers for disparate modems and other devices.

"Disparate" modems, eh? ;-) Anyways... Try this link for modem init strings and drivers. Good luck.

First hop from modem to terminal server is 120 ms minimum on a dialup connection, period.

Turn off error correction and data compression (do them in the app, not in the modem) and the minimum latency goes down by at least 50 ms. It may not beat DSL, but you don't need extra hardware nor a $240/year service contract upgrade from dial-up Internet access.

56k modes can send 53kbps easily.

Not according to this page and this page. In order for a "56k" connection to work, the party on the "ISP" end has to have a digital phone line.

First hop from modem to terminal server is 120 ms minimum on a dialup connection, period.

Turn off error correction and data compression (do them in the app, not in the modem) and the minimum latency goes down by at least 50 ms. It may not beat DSL, but you don't need extra hardware nor a $240/year service contract upgrade from dial-up Internet access.

56k modes can send 53kbps easily.

Not according to this page and this page. In order for a "56k" connection to work, the party on the "ISP" end has to have a digital phone line.

So why is he such a visionary if Winmodems are so bad?

Winmodems aren't necessarily bad they just have tradeoffs. For example, see this link.

I think the main reason people around here don't like them is because the companies that make them are usually pretty protective of their software drivers. So no one can write Linux drivers for them without some kind of massive reverse engineering.

I've heard of research that indicates that single-line dial-up has not yet reached a hard speed limit, but I doubt if anyone's interested in spending R&D on dialup speed just now. Despite the closings, broadband is still rapidly expanding, mostly through the baby bells and the cable giants.

Then there's "shotgunning", aka multilink, which has been around for years, which bonds two or more telephone lines.

I'm lucky NOW to get a 9600. Usually it's about 7200. Yes, bps. And then only to one ISP.

Sounds like they hosed something up on the inter-CO trunks (misconfigured IMTs or something like that) somewhere between your exchange(s) and the ISP. Until they fix it you might try temporarily disabling 56K (V.90, x2 and/or K56). Often the fallback from 56K protocols is butt ugly, but if you skip that and start out at V.34 it can be less drastic a dive. The commands to do that vary modem to modem, several are listed here at 56k.com. Just scroll down and you will see lots of modems and their 56K disable commands listed.

Hope this helps you out.

isps.com did just that so they would be indexed by the search engines. The Links engine (see http://www.56k.com/links for an example) stores links in a database, but generates static html pages.

Everyone has been talking about web-wide search engines. Having a mix of dynamic and static content also presents problems for a site-wide search engine, unless you have the scratch or programming savvy to write a local search engine to query both.