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This article first appeared in the October 1998 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
Posting my email address out in a public forum such as this attracts a lot of email. There's the inevitable group of messages every month saying something clever like "Windoze Rulz!!!!" or "Macz bite it! Get a real computer!" or "Linux is the future." Although I don't necessarily disagree with the third, it's nice that this kind of email graffiti is much easier to clean up than the more traditional kind made with spray paint. It's good that these messages are far outnumbered by ones somewhat less partisan.
But, I've been noticing an odd fact about the serious emails: every month there's a definite topic that seems to dominate. This month the topic was modems. More specifically, several people asked whether they should upgrade to 56K modems, and, if so, what brand?
Answering this is not as straight forward as it might seem, because the 56K modems are more complicated than their predecessors.
A couple of years ago, several of the biggest modem manufacturers introduced competing and incompatible methods for modems to communicate at up to 56,000 bits per second. U. S. Robotics was first with their X2 protocol, while Rockwell International and Lucent Technologies were close on their heels with another protocol called K56flex. This was a problem for buyers because X2 and K56 modems cannot speak to each other at any speed higher than 33,600 bits per second. A heated competition followed, with each company trying to turn its own protocol into the international standard.
Both camps decided that a good way to wedge their own modems into the marketplace was to get Internet service providers to support their standard. Then the customers calling the ISPs would have to buy modems supporting the same protocol, if they wanted high speed connections. So, they began selling modems to local ISPs at very attractive prices and sat back waiting for the 1997 Christmas buying frenzy to roll around.
The strategy failed. The marketplace was smart enough to realize that if they bought, say, a K56 modem today and X2 modems became the norm, then they'd be up the bitstream without a paddle.
Faced with sales far below predictions, the modem industry got together late last year, and in January agreed upon a compromise standard called v.90. Almost immediately v.90 modems began to appear, but it was not until just a few weeks ago that the standard was officially approved by the ITU, which is the international standards arbiter.
In the mean time, where does that leave us?
If you really feel the need for speed right now, contact your ISP and ask about v.90. Many ISPs have been slow to upgrade because they felt burned by the promises of the companies during the big battle of 1997. Upgrading is expensive and potentially disruptive, so they didn't want to make the same mistake twice.
Even more important than the protocol fights, there are hardware issues with all the 56K modems that you may not be able to solve. The reason for this is that they work differently than previous modems because they exploit how the telephone company's internal switches are wired.
Unless you have a special expensive phone line, such as ISDN or ADSL, the signal your own phone or modem sends and receives is an analog signal. This analog signal goes down a pair of wires to a telephone company switching station, where it is either relayed unchanged to another switching station, or it is converted to a digital signal. Telephone calls of any distance are converted to a digital signal because the telephone company can transmit many digital signals at the same time over the same set of wires, which saves them much copper--pennies and wire.
Most telephone calls undergo two transformations--translations from analog to digital at each end of the conversation. These translations introduce limitations which cap ordinary modem-to-modem speed at about 33,600 bits per second. The 56K modems get around this limit by hooking your ISP directly to the phone company's digital backbone so there's only one digital to analog conversion. This allows them to send you information at high speed, but you can only send them information with the old speed limit of 33,600 bits per second.
This analog to digital rigmarole introduces one more twist. If there's an analog to analog switch somewhere between you and the digital signal, even your ISPs signal can't be faster than 33,600 bits per second. This is the case with many phone lines, including my own. It's a waste of money for me to pay extra for any modem faster than 33.6K.
If you have a computer and a 33.6K (v.34) modem you can test your line to see if it will support a 56K modem by calling a test site set up by U. S. Robotics. In a terminal program, such as ZTerm or ClarisWorks, call (847)262-6000 and log in with the user name "Line" and the password "Test" and follow the instructions.
There's one more caveat about the v.90 protocol.
Many of us remember the last big jump in modem speeds from the 14.4K v.32 protocol to the 33.6K v.34bis protocol four or five years ago. The v.34 protocol was far more complicated than the v.32 protocol, and it took the modem makers almost a year to get it working well. (My early v.34 U. S. Robotics Sportster went through three ROM upgrades in one year before it could reliably stay connected.) The v.90 protocol is far more complicated than the v.34 protocol, and it's going to be a while before the modem ROMs are tweaked to work exactly the way they should.
This all may turn out to be moot very soon. Higher-speed digital connections are promised for the Louisville area in the next few months. Cable modems should be available in the fiber enhanced areas late this year or early next year. They are forty times as fast as the fastest modem. Several local telephone companies are rolling out ADSL services. These are purely digital telephone lines which allow speeds of 128,000 bits per second.
The big question seems to be how much these new services will cost, and the companies give different answers on different days of the week. The good news is that every time I ask, the price seems to edge downward.
Miscellaneous
As an example of problems mentioned above, Apple has acknowledged that the v.90 modems shipping inside the iMac have problems connecting with some ISPs. As a work-around for this problem, Apple has issued a new modem script which makes the modem connect reliably, but only at 33.6K.
Several more software updates were also released for the iMac.
The iMac CD Update reduces the amount of vibration caused by certain CDs in the internal CD-ROM drive. This vibration is typically caused by unbalanced CDs when spinning at higher speeds. This vibration may cause the drive to have difficulty reading the CD. The iMac CD Firmware Update application places new firmware on the CD-ROM Drive to reduce the amount of disc vibration.
The iMac Update 1.0 is a touch-up for the software which handles USB devices. Apple recommends that every iMac owner should install this update. Only iMac owners that use additional USB devices other than the Apple USB keyboard and Apple USB mouse included with their iMac are likely to notice the improvements after installation.
All these updates are available at Apple's update web site (http://swupdates.info.apple.com/).
A file called "Mac OS 8.5 Tips and Tricks" has been floating around the Internet for the past few weeks. It purports to give information about the new Mac OS 8.5, which should be released by the time this appears in print. Actually the file is a dangerous Trojan horse which can delete files when you double-click it.
Conflict Catcher 8.1 was released by Casady & Greene. Conflict Catcher is one of those indispensable utilities that should be on every Mac. It's the best tool for tracking down annoying startup problems and easily managing different system configurations. A free limited-time demo version is available so you can try it out. Check out the Casady & Greene web site for more information (http://www.casadyg.com).
My favorite ftp client, Anarchie, just turned 3.0. And the jump to 3.0 is a very major upgrade! It added such features as being able to automatically resume downloads after dropped connections, HTTP downloads and the ability to grab an entire web site with one command. There are many more new features than I can list here. For more information, see the Stairways Software web site (http://www.stairways.com/).
Louisville Computer Society
The October 26 meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will have a demonstration by representatives from Apple of the new iMac and Mac OS 8.5.
The Louisville Computer Society meets on the fourth Monday evening of every month at 7:00 PM in the East Government Center on Juneau Drive in Middletown. For more information, see their web site at http://www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
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