David Spang,
The vast majority of Sportsters are not upgradeable to 56K without a chip replacement.
Care to comment on what you mean by vast majority?
Perhaps this will help.
About 50% of USRX modems sold represent the less-expensive Winmodem over the last 3 months? And 100% of the Winmodems are software upgradable though a driver upgrade.
USRX just lost a good portion of its competitive edge
You are just finding out the upgrade policy of USRX? This has been published since day one of the 56K push by USRX. These modems that are not software upgradeable did not loose their FLASH chips. They never had them!
P.S. My previous post on USR that raised these questions can be found here:
As I recall you where quoting garb that was told to you by a direct competitor of USRX, no? What did you expect him to say, that he invests in USRX and they have a great product? Sorry, but it don't work that way. As far as the questions that you raised, they where answered by myself and others many thousands of posts ago. Check back a few months.
As far as upgrading a modem, USRX offers an upgrade otption for the user in which USRX will swap the chip for you, or you can have the chip shipped to your door, and change it. Kind of like replacing the batteries in my pilot, except their is only one. For the software upgrade option, you download a copy of the new driver and run an executable from a command prompt. Upgrade is complete. Do that with a zoom modem (hardware OR software). Seems like a "competative edge" to me, no?
no one has responded yet to the questions in my previous post about Winmodem performance issues under 56K.
My software upgradable LAN interface can max out at over 4 Megabits/Second using a software driver. All data streams are buffered on the PC and converted to a bit pattern that the driver is programmed to send to the card on an as-needed (interrupt driven from card) basis. The only limitation here is the 802.3 chip used, not the driver or the PC (75Mhz Pentium). Lets see now. that comes to about 100 times the throughput "demands" as would be seen by the 56Kbps modem. The PC handles it with little issue. My PC resident software video driver interfaces the I/O of the video card at a rate of about 15,360,000 Bps with horespower to spare for Doom (320x200, 255color(8 bit), 30 frames/sec). The software video drivers indeed use a good portion of available CPU resourses, but then it is operating a rate that is about 300 times the I/O of what a typical 56K data stream to a modem (including processing overhead). It does'nt take an engineer to see that the ZOOM marketing puke you get your USRX "facts" from is willing to say anything to get the focus off of thier last earnings report. Can't say as I blame him...a drowning man will do anything to get above water.
PRB |
