Yes, I was dialing into my own network.
No, I didn’t make the connection to the weather.
Yes, it was LD from coast to coast, via AT&T calling card.
Yes, I did make the point that it was time-dependent. But, that could have easily been a local-loop circuit dependency. Where, I got a circuit that wasn’t limited.
I am now back on the west coast and no longer in southern bell’s region. However, when I was there, I ran local loop tests that indicated that the problem was on the near-end (NC). On the CA end, I consistantly get >33.6K connections. I get similar results from CO, NV, WA, and OR metro areas (>33.6K, consistently [I run both V.90 and 33.6K modem banks]). Only in southern bell’s regions does it drop to 14.4K (I was in Graham, NC).
Note: In the past 15 years, most (90%) of the bandwidth problems, using modems, both customer and corporate, that I have had, were “last mile” issues (IOW, local loop, usually at the end-node).