K56 upgrades:
Jhild wonders, "To me the more interesting problem, or should I say opportunity, is how to spin this so the ISP's look like they have had the customers interests at heart all along."
I don't think this is so hard, so I'm going to give the ISP secret. Besides, they don't read this thread, or we'd hear more whining....
It seems unlikely that the K56 head-end product is going to have the same product that the early K56 consumer modems have, namely, not enough memory to hold both the K56 and V.90 protocols. I don't know why I think this, except it's very bad to get caught without enough memory in the ISP product, and it's somewhat more important to trim costs in the consumer product, especially when you're going in as a low-priced alternative to the USR Sportster.
So the ISP is going to upgrade to V.90-compliant code as soon as they trust it, knowing that they will still have K56 backwards compatibility. Then, they should wait until the word on the street about major modem models is good, and then advise their K56 customers to upgrade. "Don't hurry to upgrade," they should say, "because we have support for both."
This works fine if you're the typical consumer, and have only one ISP. If not, you will want to upgrade as soon as possible.
X2 users, on the other hand, may want to upgrade as soon as possible, since they always have backwards compatibility, and they get any other fixes by upgrading.
That's my take on it, anyway. Your baudrate may vary.
Dick |
