> The former may be true, but it doesn't follow from the latter.  A modem
> typically interrupts somewhere between every character and every 10-15
> characters.  A decent network interface interrupts once per packet (or
> even less than that, if packets are coming in fast enough and the card
> and driver support multiple receive buffers).
> 
> Thus, I'd say, it depends on what the T1 interface hardware is like.
> If it's decent, I'd be astonished to find a 386 "WAAAAAAAAAAAY to
> slow".  (Not that I haven't been astonished before, nor won't be again,
> of course.)

Aah thanks for reminding me about that...  I was running a 16450 clone
on the IO board on that thing, 1 byte per interrupt... yuck.

My Livingston OR-HS router is rated up to E1 sync (so 4.1 mbps total
throughput), and its running an AM386SL/25 CPU.  It also has software
STAC compression for lines under 128k.  With my current 56k line (which
will be upgraded to a Frame T1 soon, YAY!!!) I can get up to 12:1
compression when tcpblasting (/dev/zero?), so there is obviously enough
CPU there.  I am not sure what kind of ethernet chipset it uses, but my
guess is NE2000, since thats what my PM2-ER has.

JS