Glenn, although a US standard may be reach by end of 1/98 - if the licensing and royalty are hammered out smoothly, which I doubt, it will take engineering in most cos. 2 months to modify SW and some HW tweaking. It would require some additional effort to conform various international PTT standards as well. Regarding the US market, the earliest ISPs and telcos can deploy,in small scale, 56k-standard RAS is early April. Another factor would be how fast will customer embrace and shell out money to upgrade their modems to the standard ones. In the mean time, WorldNet may purchase some RAS to satisfy immediate demand as UUnet has done, then later it can upgrade RAS w/ the new SW.
However, in order to optimize the transmission rate, eventually NW cos will need to tweak their H/W as well. So, full scale deployment w/ new HW and SW in the US could take 6 mos from now. For international markets, it could take at least the same amount of time. WorldNet hasn't used ASND's RAS. But this doesn't prevent WorldNet from evaluating ASND's RAS in the future. I confirm that WorldNet has been using Livingston PortMaster-3 to support K56Flex. This was one of the reason why LU was so familiar w/ Livingston, which led to its acquisition. However, WorldNet may be looking for higher port desity at competitive price, more versatile, scalable RAS which also support dedicated traffics. |
