> > Maybe I'm grasping for straw here, is there _anybody_ out there that can
> > give me a definitive answer as to why ppp performance degrades steadily?
>
> Sounds like the USR "spiraling death syndrome", but of course you
> need to be using a particular model of USR modem.
Spiralling death only affected older Sportsters, I think. Also, it
usually set in more quickly and more severely than Russell's problem --
the line tended to drop within minutes, rather than getting a slow
throughput decrease over hours (which I think is what Russ mentioned).
I had a Sportster upgraded a couple of weeks ago to fix this. Sadly, it
now seems to have developed "burning death syndrome", where it gets very
hot very quickly and shuts down.
Not that this is anything to do with linux-kernel, of course...
phil