Sounds like he has a 56k modem and his ISP just upgraded to the same sort of 56k modem he has. That is part of the protocol negotiation. (In the future, it will take 30 minutes to finish connecting with a modem, but we will all get 666k transmission speed over normal phone lines.)

Yeah. Credit-card verification terminals and similar devices are typically locked into some low speed, 300 baud or 1200 or rarely 2400, because they don't have many characters to send in a standard transaction, and the slow speeds have a much faster setup/training time, especially when they don't have to adaptively negotiate a connection speed. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639