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56-Kbps Modems Still Flaky

V.90 standard for 56-kbps not implemented on all back-end servers--and may not be for six months.

By Brian McWilliams, PCWorld   

Bob Ollerton is technical director at Splitrock Services, the Texas company to which Prodigy outsourced its dial-up network last summer.

%dquotWe were not aware of this V.90 anomaly until about two weeks ago, when Prodigy users started to buy the V.90 modems,%dquot Ollerton says. He adds that V.90 modems on Prodigy are %dquotlucky to get 28.8.%dquot

Last month, 3Com confirmed a bug in early versions of the x2 firmware for its servers. The bug prevented 3Com V.90 modems from properly negotiating a 56-kbps connection with 3Com%squots Total Control remote-access equipment.

Splitrock primarily uses x2 equipment from Bay Networks for its 56-kbps connections. Bay licensed x2 technology from 3Com last summer and wrote its own firmware for its 5000 MSX platform.

According to Bay Networks product manager Jeff Wolf, the company recently revised its firmware to prevent connection problems with 3Com V.90 modems. Splitrock is testing the new code now and expects its thousands of Bay Networks x2 dial-ins to be running it within two weeks.

Wolf says many 56-kbps problems can be avoided if modem users delay upgrading to V.90. But, he points out, modem vendors are marketing the new technology hard, and he predicts that will intensify now that 3Com has released V.90 firmware for its server-side equipment.

Says Wolf: %dquotI think [3Com is] going to try to capitalize on that by encouraging users to upgrade to V.90 and dial in to [3Com] Total Control-based ISPs. It%squots just one more opportunity to grab market share. Once again it%squots doing a disservice to the users out there. I encourage users to not upgrade to V.90 until your ISP has upgraded.%dquot

He suggests waiting until the V.90 standard has been ratified, saying that the standard will change again before it is ratified.

Wolf says Bay won%squott release final V.90 code for its dial-in equipment until August. The International Telecommunications Union is expected to formally ratify the V.90 standard in September.

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