According to John Maier:
>
>I tried turning off compression, and error corrections, but this didn't   
>really help.
>

Could it be that you have a grungy phone line?  I know that people
here have had problems with slow modems until they hassled the phone
company to change the line.  After that things were fine.

The other thing (and it is a familiar refrain) check out your flow
control - lots of bizarre things can happen with bad flow control when
using slip.

>Some the things I notice are, if the link is left idle for a moment and   
>then a FTP xfer is started, initially the rate is fairly quick (2800   
>bytes/sec) and begins quickly to drop to 400 bytes/sec.  Telnet exhibits   
>the same problems.
>

I would imagine that the effect you are seeing here is the compression
buffer filling up - initially since there is room the modem sucks in
the data nicely but when the buffer fills things slow down.

BTW I run my v.34 modems at 57600 since the compression can easily
saturate a 38400 link.

-- 
Brett Lymn, Computer Systems Administrator, AWA Defence Industries
===============================================================================
"It's fifteen hundred miles to Ankh-Morpork" he said.  "We've got
three hundred and sixty three elephants, fifty carts of forage, the
monsoon's about to break and we're wearing ... we're wearing ... sort
of things, like glass, only dark... dark glass things on our eyes..."
        - Terry Pratchett "Moving Pictures".