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PC Week and PC World are reporting that Lucent is ready to license its patents on 56K technology should the ITU incorporate that technology into the eventual international 56K standard. Lucent believes that its patents on PCM technology will limit other patent applications.
Global Village has posted the trade-in details for their TelePort Speakerphone Edition. Formerly, they expected to provide an upgrade, but they will now trade-in your speakerphone model for a non-speakerphone 56K model. Note that their web page may be difficult to access.
Global Village will be providing K56flex modems for Apple's Power Mac 6500s.
AOL's current software is limited to 57600 bps serial port speeds. Brian McWilliams has a PC World article on the subject. The serial port limit reduces modem performance when downloading uncompressed files.
The Age, an Australian publication, has an article about 56K that offers a good explanation of quantization noise. Quantization noise occurs when analog signals are converted into digital signals, and is the reason 56K modems currently upload at 33.6 speeds: in the upstream path, the signal goes from analog to digital.
Michael Cozzi has a Mac CCL file that will work with most K56flex modems.
Joe Mosch writes:
Diamond Multimedia has a beta firmware upgrade to 1.003 for their Macintosh SupraExpress 56e and the speakerphone version too (56e sp). They say you might get lower connect rates with the new firmware so they also include a downgrade back to the 0.519 version.
The Mac beta firmware is on Diamond's beta site.
CNNfn reports that the next version of WebTV will include a 56K modem. The second-generation box will allow viewers to surf the web and watch TV at the same time, and will include a hard drive, according to Inter@active Week.
Petri Linden spotted flash upgrades for the Dynalink K56flex modem at ftp://ftp.lappower.se/Pub/TILLBEH/MODEM/.
Computer Shopper has reviews of the ActionTec 56K and Best Data Mach 2.
Small correction to Friday's news: Tom Hanson works for Zoom, not MSN, but does handle Zoom's tech support on MSN.
56K.COM is written and maintained by Les Jones. Artwork by Mark Maxwell. Copyright 1997 Softwords.
