ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿAugust 08, 1997
Bargain Hunting for 56K Modems
(08/08/97; 5:30 p.m. EDT)
By Cynthia Morgan, Windows Magazine
If you're thinking of upgrading to a 56-kilobits-per-second modem, you're in luck: It's a buyer's market. The rapid evolution and even more rapid price drops for these products make it a hot summer for bargain-hunting Web surfers, and things won't cool down by fall.
Thanks to lukewarm sales, modem manufacturers have cut prices on 56-Kbps modems by 50 percent or more. A Zoom K56flex internal modem, for example, now costs as little as $99. And prices are even lower for older V.34 products. Compaq's Microcom subsidiary last week announced that it will sell a DeskPorteS 33.6 modem for as little as $60.
Of course, there are some good reasons why 56-Kbps adoption has been slower than most modem manufacturers anticipated. One big reason is that these devices really don't work very well. For example, reports from the field (and Windows Magazine) show that few phone lines can consistently support connection speeds of 50 Kbps or better, which takes 56 Kbps out of the realm of ISDN-killer.
Moreover, the new modems fail to achieve a link that can pass data more often than their older V.34 counterparts. "Typical V.34 connect success rate is 97 percent or better; we're showing a connect failure rate of 6 percent to 8 percent [with 56-Kbps devices]," said Warren L. Henderson Jr., president of Henderson Communications Labs, a test facility in Riverside, Calif. "If 8 percent of the calls fail and 12 percent connect at 28.8 Kbps or less, the ISP or user is looking at a 20 percent failure to yield the purchased service."
It's difficult to tell if a particular phone line will support reliable, high-speed 56-Kbps connections, and the few connection tests available, such as US Robotics' x2 LineTest (see x2.usr.com for details), sometimes return misleading results. And, as often happens with higher-bandwidth service, charges for 56-Kbps access can add as much as $6.95 per hour to users' "unlimited Internet" access fees.
In their defense, most modem makers now offer a money-back guarantee. They're also updating modem drivers almost weekly. The new firmware, usually downloadable from the manufacturer's Website, can improve 56-Kbps performance, sometimes dramatically. But it also forces modem owners to routinely upgrade a hardware product, something most modem owners aren't used to.
Nevertheless, Rockwell Semiconductor Systems last week boasted that it has shipped 3.9 million K56flex chipsets to manufacturers worldwide since production began in May. About one million of those are going into central-site equipment, the devices ISPs and corporations use to host incoming connections. The rest are being incorporated into desktop modems.
The proponent of rival -- and incompatible -- 56-Kbps standard, US Robotics' x2, hasn't been exactly sitting on its hands, either.
At the present time, working x2 POP<Picture> connections greatly outnumber K56flex, and US Robotics' months-long head start on K56flex in the modem marketplace, coupled with strong advertising, has given it a definite edge. "It's taken a lot longer than we thought for K56flex to reach the POPs, and right now there are more x2 POPs than K56flex," admitted Steve McIntyre, central-site modem product manager at US Robotics. "But we expect the numbers to cross over to a K56flex majority in late September" (when K56flex projects for Internet giants Uunet and BBN Planet come online).
he two providers, who own many of the local U.S. access points for America Online and the Microsoft Network, will roll out thousands of K56flex POPs in coming months.
Next year, the International Telecommunications Union is expected to rule on a final 56-Kbps standard that will likely be a hybrid and probably, to some degree, incompatible with both x2 and K56flex. By that time, however, the new standards will only affect buyers of new modems.
"ISPs' central-site equipment already has to support a wide variety of standards to satisfy customer demands," McIntyre noted. "When the new standard comes along, it will support it along with all the older standards." |
