UPDATE: Standard Will Spur 56K Modem Adoption
By Todd Spangler
A standard for 56-Kbps modem operation, expected to be determined later this month at a meeting of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), will significantly affect adoption rates of 56K analog technology, particularly among corporate information systems managers, according to industry observers.
Modem and communications-equipment vendors said they could ship upgrades and products based on the proposed standard--tentatively called V.pcm, for "pulse code modulation"--as soon as the end of March.
"The standard is huge for the industry," said Abner Germanow of IDC Research. "To be in a situation with two different technologies where you're forcing your customer to do extra work doesn't promote sales, makes life difficult, and is expensive for everyone involved."
Last December, an ITU working group of engineers representing 32 companies resolved the two major technical discrepancies--signal mapping and spectral shaping--between the competing 56K technologies: x2, 3Com Corp.'s version, and K56flex, developed by Rockwell Semiconductor Systems and Lucent Technologies.
Modem and dial-up access-server vendors said the ITU's 56K standard, to which the vendors will provide free upgrades for nearly all current 56K products, promises to be more robust than the current generation of x2 and K56flex modems.
"We expect users will see a performance enhancement and a slight coverage improvement with V.pcm [over x2]," said Neil Clemmons, vice president of marketing for 3Com's personal communications group. <>P> Both x2 and K56flex products will be backward-compatible with the older proprietary technologies, equipment vendors said. All 3Com products that support V.pcm will also support x2. Likewise, all K56flex products upgraded to V.pcm--including those from Ascend Communications--will support K56flex clients.
But because of the licensing terms from 3Com, Rockwell, and Lucent, no single modem or device can contain both x2 and K56flex, said Jon Sieg, general manager of the signal processing group at Bay Networks. Bay Networks is the only vendor that today sells both x2 and K56flex access servers.
"Contractually, we can't include x2 and K56flex in the same product," Sieg said. "We've been a little disappointed in the big players in that they did force that."
Relief In Sight for ISPs
ISPs, which said they will upgrade to the standard as soon as equipment vendors release the upgrades, have struggled with the incompatible 56K technologies for more than a year. "V.pcm is a great tool for the ISP community, because they've been running both modem technologies," said Mike Reed, director of product marketing for Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc. "This doubles their ability to reach customers."
For MCI, which uses the 3Com TotalControl platform, upgrading to V.pcm will be "just an administrative task," said Bob Smith, senior manager for internetMCI marketing. He added that MCI will undertake extensive testing before rolling out V.pcm-compliant ports. Many ISPs have already adopted one or both 56K technologies--several just in the fourth quarter of 1997, including AT&T WorldNet and Uunet Technologies.
Alan Taffel, Uunet's vice president of marketing and business development, said that the reason many ISPs waited to move to 56K was that the equipment had finally become software-upgradable last fall. Uunet said it had deployed K56flex at more than 500 of its points of presence by the end of 1997.
"Most of [last] year, if you were an ISP and you wanted to do 56K, you had to do it in firmware," he said. "All of the consumer modems now are based on DSPs [digital signal processors], so we're comfortable with our migration paths to the new standard."
But it seems likely that ISPs will have to continue to maintain separate dial-up phone numbers for at least a year to support existing users of K56flex and x2 who will not upgrade their equipment to the new standard.
Though all modem makers plan free software upgrades for users who have purchased either an x2 or a K56flex modem, ISPs can expect that more than 50 percent of their users will not upgrade, said 3Com's Clemmons.
"From our standpoint, there will be certain customers who will never upgrade," Clemmons said. "The modem they bought is working, and they'll never get around to it."
Paul Kraska, product marketing manager at Multi-Tech Systems Inc., said many modem manufacturers were losing money because of the divergent 56K technologies. "There was a lot of modem manufacturing that happened in expectation of sales that didn't happen," he said.
Kraska added, "In my opinion, things were settled was because K56flex was winning--it had more vendors behind it, and I think 3Com said, 'We need to resolve this before we start to lose market share.'"
But Clemmons denied that 3Com--which last year purchased U.S. Robotics and its x2 technology--finally agreed to a 56K standard because of market-share pressures.
"We've picked up significant market share both in ISPs and consumer segments," he said. "I don't think delaying the rollout of x2 would have accelerated the standards process."
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