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Technology Stocks : COMS & the Ghost of USRX w/ other STUFF -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scrapps who wrote (15141)	5/1/1998 6:49:00 PM
From: David Lawrence	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 22053

Here's some smoldering embers for ya..... infoworld.com K56flex 'upgrade' may actually make your modem run slower than before . . This mess exists because the original Rockwell chipset for K56flex modems -- produced in a furious attempt to catch up to the x2 brand of 56Kbps modems introduced by U.S. Robotics -- can address only 1MB of memory. That isn't enough to hold both the new V.90 code and the old K56flex code, plus all the other basic functions that a modern desktop modem supports. Dean Grumlose, a product line manager at Rockwell, in Newport Beach, Calif., says both K56flex and V.90 code can fit into server-side ISP and corporate digital modems with 1MB of memory, but not into client-side desktop modems. The code to implement this in most server-side environments, however, is still in beta testing and is not yet widely used. . . The upgrade decision for x2 modems is straightforward -- I recommend you upgrade immediately. All x2 modems were shipped with 2MB of memory to make them both software-upgradable and downward compatible, says John Powell, an engineer in 3Com's U.S. Robotics unit, in Mount Prospect, Ill. . . You can get the x2/V.90 upgrade from 3com.com for client-side modems. The server-side software for ISPs is already installed in many places. Even if your ISP hasn't upgraded from x2 to V.90 yet, your upgraded modem will still work at high x2 speeds. And you may gain a 7 percent to 10 percent performance improvement due to better error handling in the new x2/V.90 code, Powell says. (Don't expect much more than 45Kbps downloads from any of these modems, despite the implication of "56Kbps.") This kind of easy upgrade isn't the case with Rockwell's K56flex. . . "What [C]Rockwell has done is allow each vendor to decide what to do," says Lisa Pelgrim, a senior analyst at Dataquest, in San Jose, Calif. That means dozens of different modem vendors have shipped a zoo of nonupgradable, partially upgradable, or "dual-mode" (2MB) K56flex modems, each with its own upgrade software. (K56flex modems based on the Lucent chipset seem to have sufficient memory for downward compatibility.)