Since Steve's too busy not updating, I noticed that John Carmack updated his .plan about modem play. Here's a snip:

I have been playing a lot of Q3 on a 28.8 modem for the last several days. I finally found a case of the stuck-at-awaiting-gamestate problem that turned out to be a continuous case of a fragment of the gamestate getting dropped. I have changed the net code to space out the sending of the fragments based on rate. Note that there have been a few different things that result in stuck at gamestate or stuck at snapshot problems. We have fixed a few of them, but there may well still be other things that we haven't found yet. You can still have a fun game on a 28.8 modem. It is a significant disadvantage, no question about it, but you can still have a good game if you play smart. If there is someone that knows what they are doing on a server with a ping in the low 100s, there won't usually be much you can do, but a skilled modem player can still beat up on unskilled T1 players...