It's hard to tell whether the ROK/LU product can upgrade, but it's likely....
W.F.Rakecky said, "Robot can migrate via software to the new standard.ROK/LU can upgrade their stop-gap chip via software but will have to hardware upgrade to mixed protocols. I believe this is where the ROK camp is obfuscating the issue. They can software up-grade to K56flex but they will only be able to hardware upgrade to a mixed protocol."
USR calls their Courier modem V.everything for a reason. They've been doing software-driven modems for a while, and they know they can add anything. They've promised that they can upgrade everything to the standard, whenever it occurs.
Now, some of the LU/ROK modem vendors have made the same sort of promises, but they seem to be rather more careful about the wording. You can't tell whether they mean to swap code, or swap the whole modem.
I don't think we'll know for sure what those vendors can actually do until someone has product in hand. I think it's very likely that the final product of both ROK and LU can be upgraded, by software, to meet whatever the ITU comes up with for V.PCM when they standardize.
From pro-Lucent comments in this forum, I understand (but have not seen for myself) that the Lucent chipset now being shipped to RAS vendors is supposed to already be upgradable, although it's currently shipping with only V.34 software; the code for K56flex is supposed to be done soon.
I'm much less sure about initial Rockwell product. The chipsets that were shipped to MOT and others, and then pulled back because of problems, seemed to have ROM-based DSPs, like previous Rockwell modems. Then, some Rockwell releases said that their flash-based (therefore upgradable) chipsets were on schedule. I can't tell what their are supposed to be shipping... I suppose there is a bit of each, or will be soon.
I can imagine that one reason for Rockwell continuing to produce the ROM-based product is that there are existing circuit boards designed for the current Rockwell V.34 chipset, and I have gotten the impression that the ROM-based K56 replacement was pin-compatible, and therefor easy for Rockwell's modem-building customers to switch to, while the flash-based K56 parts have more pins, and so need a new circuit board layout. This is all my personal impression, based on various press releases (mostly cited in this forum, or rather, in USRX/COMS and "stuff", where we've gone through this in intense detail). None of these comments are based on getting any closer to an actual K56 modem than some ads in catalogs!
Has anyone got a K56 modem which they'd like to tell us about? Now that there is an ISP who claims to have the server-end product, has anyone tried it? |
