You don't really *believe* this, do you? At this point, V.90 is more
marketing hype than reality on most, if not all, servers. The only
reason Ascend or USR have V.90 in a full release is that they're less
picky about the stability of non-beta releases than Lucent RABU is.
I may be mistaken here, but isn't USR in the same boat as Lucent when it
comes to the interoperability with Rockwell's V.90? And Ascend... I
haven't had to administer a piece of Ascend gear for a while, but they
were going through a patch-of-the-day phase when I had to manage one (I
believe it was for V.42 support - remember *those* headaches?). If they've
maintained that MO, then there's no telling what their implementation looks
like at this point.
The fact is that V.90 is still only a proposed standard. It will change
before it's ratified, and most people with V.90 modems will have to upgrade
by the end of the year.
If people call us and ask what to buy to get 56K connections, we tell them
to get s K56Flex modem that can be flash-upgraded, and not to bother with
V.90 yet. If they've already bought a modem, it's usually a USR, and they
do pretty well with our PM3. If it's one of these crummy Rockwell jobs that
can't hold both V.90 and KFlex, then we try to explain that V.90 isn't a
ratified standard yet, and won't be until the latter part of the year, and
they should try to flash it to KFlex.
Have we had people complain about that? Yep, some. Have any of them left
over it? One or two. Are they happier at their new ISP? Who knows?
They might be making 53K connections all the time, but given the technical
levels of some of our competition, I tend to doubt it.
Frankly, the 2 I know of who have left over this were 2 of the more high-
maintenance, whining lusers we had, and none of us were sorry to see them
go (especially the guy who had to "replatform" his machine (his term for
re-installing Win95) every month, and would try to use us as his general PC
knowledge base. "I know this isn't about the Internet, but I figured you
guys probably know this..."). They tend to believe the marketing hype rather
than reality, because it's a shinier object for them to fixate on :) Most
people, when they find out that V.90 ain't a standard just yet, say that
they didn't realize that, and work within the parameters we've got (which
are those of 3.8b15).
Do I wish 3.8b15 worked better with V.34? You betcha. But as we roll out
the new 56K service, people have to either expect some pain on the bleeding
edge, or stay back a step or two and live with it.
Whew! I didn't mean for this to be so long-winded, but just like we went
through with K56Flex, this stuff isn't going to happen overnight, even if
some people threaten to hold their breath and turn blue. I still think
this is going more smoothly than did the adoption of the V.34 (28.8K)
protocol, if any of you are old enough to remember that ;-)
========================================================================
Joe Hartley - jh@brainiac.com - brainiac services, inc
PO Box 5069 : Greene, RI : 02827 - vox 401.539.9050 : fax 401.539.2070
Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa
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