• Recommend:
• 0 Comments

56K Rollout Almost Complete

Deployment allows servers to support 56-kbps modem standard.

By Dan Littman, PCWorld   

Happy days have arrived at last for 56-kbps modem owners: The V.90 protocol, which supports the two incompatible 56-kbps modem standards, has finally been deployed by many major Internet service providers. And many other ISPs are completing the test cycle and expect to roll out V.90 support within weeks. With the V.90 firmware running on their modem servers, ISPs can push data at full 56-kbps rates to users dialing in with modems built on either K56flex or x2 chip sets.

ISPs Climb on the Bandwagon
America Online says its network providers have deployed V.90 support on more than 90 percent of the ports available to AOL users, while CompuServe has V.90 running in 200 cities and expects to upgrade more than 90 percent of its network by the end of the year.

At Concentric Networks, Vice President of Operations Tony Zeis says the company is "in the final stages of testing V.90 and ... anticipates deployment at the end of [September]." Atlanta-based MindSpring earlier this week announced that it has begun rolling out V.90 and expects more than 80 percent of its customers to have V.90 access within a month. And in Fairfax, Virginia, UUNet Technologies, which provides network services to many national ISPs, announced in late June that it had deployed V.90 support on more than 300,000 ports at more than 700 access points.

EarthLink Director of Internet Operations Steve Dougherty says his company uses UUNet in many areas. In areas where EarthLink runs its own network, "We think that we will roll out [V.90] in three to four weeks," Dougherty says. Microsoft Network Premiere runs entirely on UUNet's network.

The Standards Wars
The sordid history of the 56-kbps modem is enough to make anyone who's been following the industry groan. For some time modem users were forced to choose devices based on either 3Com U.S. Robotics x2 or Lucent/Rockwell's K56flex standards, depending on what the users' ISPs were supporting. Fortunately, modem manufacturers and vendors finally managed to put together a unified 56K standard called V.90.

3Com says all x2 modems will use x2 to achieve 56-kbps speeds until ISPs convert to V.90. However, K56flex modems can only hold either K56flex code or V.90 code. So if you upgrade to V.90 before your ISP provides it, you lose K56flex functionality, and your modem will be limited to a 33.6-kbps maximum data rate.