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External or hardware modem?

B

Bojax

Senior member
Is there much of a difference in using an external modem over a hardware modem? I'm assuming there is because of the vast difference in price. I've seen them cheap on ebay. $20.00 shipped that is.
 
imo, there's no difference
and if i am correct, all usb modems are not hardware modems, but software modems
 
do they have hardware modems in the pci flavor? i've been on cable for a few years, but back when i was on modem, it seemed the only hardware modems i could find were isa.
 
there are some pci hardware modems but they are quite rare and it is hard to differentiate them from soft modems
 
With any reasonably fast machine, you'd never notice the difference between hardware and software modems, and an internal modem, even software-based, could actually be faster than an external serial-connected hardware modem. A serial port is limited to 115,200bps throughput. This is the raw data, before any compression. So no matter how good the compression is, throughput is limited to that. An internal modem doesn't have that limitation so the modem can work at its highest compression rate to get maximum throughput. A USB modem of course bypasses the limitation as well, but most are software modems. In the real world, it's not noticeable anyway.

ActionTec at one point made a hardware-controlled version of PCI modems as well as software; they don't seem to tout their PCI modems as hardware now though, so I'm guessing they've moved to all software. I think 3Com makes a hardware PCI modem. Either way, you do pay for the privilege. The first PCI modems were indeed all software-based, and very few companies bothered to make hardware modems because by that point, nobody cared, any machine could work well with a soft-modem.
 
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