Quicker modem connection time is achieved through faster handshaking. The shortened start-up time is accomplished by buffering information on past connections then, when a match is found, handshaking can immediately begin at a previously negotiated rate. When V.42 is combined with GAO's V.92 softmodem, full advantage of both standards is realized by way of greater total throughput. Due to physical limitations, hardware modems that depend on the use of serial ports are often limited to a maximum transfer rate of 115.2 kbps. GAO's V.44 software consists of both an encoder and decoder.
Encoding uses a dictionary consisting of a root-array of all characters, a node tree, and a history.
Input is matched against previously input strings, and if a string is matched it is transferred as a codeword and an attempt is made to create a longer string in the dictionary. The decoder recreates the original string from the binary-tree dictionary.