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According to most manufacturers, an AMR is an incredibly inexpensive solution for getting audio and modem functionality in your computer. In order to use an AMR, one needs to have an AMR slot which is present on most modern mainboards. The AMR is a further development of a Winmodem to take out even more of its guts and leave everything completely to the CPU. The performance and quality of AMRs can be described in one sentence. Even if they are incredibly inexpensive, I have yet to see one that is worth even half of its selling price. In other words, an AMR is a complete waste of money and a constant source of grief and computer malfunction.

Everyone knows that a 56K modem is faster than a 33.3K modem which, in turn, is faster than a 28.8K or a 14.4K modem. Well, it is not exactly true, and there is a very simple reason for that: Bandwidth.

Each modem has to operate on a specific channel, depending on its speed. The speed of each channel, in turn, depends on how many users are connected. Most modems nowadays are 56K modems and, as a consequence, those channels are jammed. Here is a real world example:

A while back, when the 33.6 K modems first came out everyone was jumping on the new, faster technology. A friend of mine using AOL had two computers, one with the 33.6K modem and the older one with the 14.4K modem. The 33.6K modem took on average 15-20 dial in attempts, while the 14.4K modem connected every time on the first attempt. Suffice it to say that on days where the web was crawling, the 14.4K modem was way faster than the 33.6K modem. So why don’t we all get a slow modem and bypass the rest of the world? The drawback of a slower modem is that, in fact, it is slower, that is, in case of down-loads, it does take for ever. Still, the point that I was trying to drive home is that pure speed isn’t everything. Most modern modems have variable speed options that can be set in the Windows control panel by unchecking the box saying:

Connect only at this speed.

This way, line faults will also not result in a disconnect but simply in a switch to another channel.

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