Actually, we have only a *proposed* standard. It won't be official
until the September ITU meeting. That's fact, and it's what I point
out to any overeager (IMO) users.
Rumors I'm hearing offline are that what's endorsed in September
probably won't be quite the same as what was proposed in February due
to interoperability issues. Said rumor was even published in one of
the trade rags (which makes it less likely to be true :).
When nobody's saying anything out in the open, I take that as license
to speculate wildly - and there's lots of interesting evidence.
When Lucent and Rockwell merged technologies to make K56Flex, they had
to give up something that the Lucent technology could do: upstream
connect rates higher than V.34+ speeds. Lucent gave that up for a
quick technology meld with Rockwell ... they didn't throw it away,
they put it on a back shelf, something to take up again later.
If you were Lucent, in a business in which USR had tried to parlay an
exclusive lock on X2 into market dominance, and you had an exclusive
advance of your own on the shelf, ...
<wild speculation on>
Is Lucent planning a "K56Flex+" with higher upstream speed? Are they
in a position to "pull an X2" by keeping it to themselves?
Are they planning on doing that, or is the industry is afraid they
are?
Why did Lucent buy Livingston? To have the server side for this
strategy?
Is Lucent pushing winmodems to establish a base of modems instantly
upgradeable to "K56Flex+" to create client-side demand? USR had to
market X2 heavily to create that demand. Lucent could turn it on
overnight by releasing a driver upgrade.
Are Rockwell and Lucent seemingly not getting along so well lately
because Rockwell is being left out?
If you were USR last Fall, you might have seen this coming. Then
you'd have faced a decision: fight to make sure that what Lucent had
would become part of V.90 (and have V.90 superior to X2) or fight to
keep it out of V.90 to protect X2 (and yield an exclusive position to
Lucent). From what I hear, one particular issue was of dominant
importance to USR, and it was willing to yield most everything else to
the K56Flex camp to get its way on that one issue.
Could we be in for a big squabble about whether the next step is
K56Flex+ or V.90+ ?
<wild speculation off>
A client of ours loaded Lucent's V.90 driver for his LT winmodem and
did some throughput speed comparisons of V.90 vs. K56Flex. They came
out virtually dead even in download speed, but K56Flex beat V.90 hands
down in upload speed. Or at least his Lucent flex talking to our
Lucent flex did.
-- Dick St.Peters, stpeters@NetHeaven.com Gatekeeper, NetHeaven, Saratoga Springs, NY, 1-800-910-6671 (voice) Saratoga/Albany/Amsterdam/BlueMountain/BoltonLanding/Cobleskill/ Greenwich/GlensFalls/LakePlacid/NorthCreek/Plattsburgh/... Oldest Internet service based in the 518 area code - To unsubscribe, email 'majordomo@livingston.com' with 'unsubscribe portmaster-users' in the body of the message. Searchable list archive: <URL:http://www.livingston.com/Tech/archive/>