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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gerard mangiardi who wrote (41244)	3/26/1998 6:53:00 PM
From: Todd DeMelle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 61433

This is reposted from the AOL Motley Fool Industry and Market Analysis thread. It is somewhat dated, but I hadn't seen this info on this thread. Subject: Re: March Boardwatch Date: Sun, Mar 22, 1998 2:52 PM From: AMWohlman Message-id: <1998032219535301.OAA00809@ladder01.news.aol.com> Everyone interested in the 56K modem war should pick up the March Boardwatch for the full story. I'll try to fill in the big pieces. This is a follow up to post from a couple weeks ago. From the charts. x2 connections 10470 calls Ave connect speed 45192 93.5% above 40 Kbps call competion rate 90.4% top seven data points(speed as best I could read from graph) no. of calls speed % of calls 3048 45.333 29 % 2944 49. 28 % 1365 49.8 13 % 1265 50.666 12 % 588 46. 5.6 % 395 43. 3.8 % 278 30. 2.7 % 147 51. 1.4 % K56Flex connection 10325 calls Ave connection speed 30849 6.52 % above 40 Kbps Calls completion rate 79 %(Boardwatch move timeout from 30 sec. to 60 sec. to give Flex more time to connect) No. of calls Speed % of calls 3855 31.200 37 % 2789 32.000 27 % 1151 38.800 11 % 874 28.800 8.4 % 535 34.000 5 % 379 34.500 3.6 % 313 42.000 3 % 287 44.000 2.8 % Modem used 2 U.S. Robotics modems for x2 Zoom, Supra, Hayes, Motorola modems for Flex >>We noted a no. of previous "lab tests" sponsored by reputable publications that would indicate parity and even a slight edge to K56flex camp. Some ten years in reporting online technologies has made us extremely skeptical of lab tests using phone systems simulator boxes. Results almost never map even broadly to real world telephone networks experiences. So we held comment for proably two long. But we assumed the differences between the two technologies would be monimal in any event Our call completion tests contained a stunner. K56Flex and x2 weren't even close. The good news is you can regularly achieve mid-fourties and as high as 50,666 connections with the new modems. The bad news is you can really only do it with one of them<< >>As to the winner 3COM/US Robotics x2 modem is very clearly the winner of the 56K battle at this point, and we would look for a continued dominance in actual performance on the release of the new v.90 release. Indeed, rumor has it 3COM was about to release some strongly improved code and decided hold it for the v.90 release.<< >> Our testing would indicate these disparities may be enormous - far beyond anything we've seen with previous modem standards<< >>It would be much more comfortable for us editorially if all these modems were created more or less equal. From the test data we have available, unfortunately they are not. We do sincerely apologize for bringing this information to light in such tardy fashion given the implications for so many end users and Internet service providers.<< Could this be the death of the commodity modem with only a x2 modem running aprrox. 50% faster than the v.34 standard. Does this mean that a ISP most run x2 to do this. With only Bay, and 3Com making the hubs to make this work, will all the Flex ISP have to start buying Total Control or will the Ascends and Lucents of the world have to get the rights to x2. The best oneliner: >>Ascend actually crowed about having 1.5 million ports up before any ports apparenty worked at all.<< >>After an initial flush of ethusiasm over x2 among the very early adopters, the end user community decided somewhat emphatically to wait for the standard. By the end of the year, US Robotics vaunted channel sales were a channel nightmare as the modems came back up the channel unsold.<< Perhaps this first rush of buyers made Robotics too hopefully for sells. >> We assumed 56K connections would be much better locally. Nyet. In fact the one best POP we found belonged to IBM, it's an x2 port, and it is located in San Diego. we got a 98.6% call completion, and we got a 50,666 connection EVERY SINGLE TIME.<< >>Across the board, there is actually a slight advantage to dialing long distance<< Testing was so one-side in x2 favor that rather than just report the findings in Jan. they sent the entire database to US Robotics, Hayes, and Rockwell to find out what they had did wrong. >>John Powell of US Robotics not only shared a lot of information about how they test modems and what they've run into, he almost crossed the line into pointing us toward some things that could be hurting the K56flex side. Nothing verified out nor could we get any improvement with anything we tried locally.<< >>Both Hayes and Rockwell assured us we were doing something wrong and that they had tons of data proving that their modems were great. They threatened to fly people out. They warned us repeatly that we needed to be accurate. But received no useful suggestions, data, or otherwise useful informations. We were told point blank that US Robotics was lying. We had to go over it three times before they finally understood that WE were doing the testing, we weren't lying<< >>Rockwell sent a senior engineer to our site for two days. He noted that he could find nothing wrong with our methodology per se<< >> The implications for V.90 are more of the same. The compromise of the 20 points of contention broadly involved adoptions of Motorola's spectral shaping techniques and US Robotics encoding or constellation shell mapping. K56flex may incur some slight improvment in dealing with digital networks from that, and the US Robotics modems may pick up a bit more ability to deal with truly gruesome local analog lines But we're persuaded that most of the differences will remain proprietary....The magic lies in the client modem calculationg what constellation to use for any given set of digital network conditions. This is NOT specified at all in V.90 and will vary entirely between US Robotics, Rockwell or Lucent.<<