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A USA Today story, "The future of high-speed Net hookups," looks at trends in Internet access. The piece quotes a Jupiter Communications study with interesting statistics:
MacConnect, a Macintosh-only ISP, is now offering K56flex at 225 U.S. locations.
Gregory Quick of Computer Retail Week reports that 3Com is preparing to release a new U.S. Robotics modem that supports Universal Serial Bus (USB).
USB is a hot-swappable, daisy-chainable, plug-and-play expansion bus that connects up to 127 devices to your computer, with speeds up to 12 megabits per second. To put that in perspective, ordinary PC serial ports are limited to 0.115 megabits per second. USB is expected to be popular for input devices like mice, keyboards, and joysticks, as well as multimedia hardware such as digital cameras and scanners. For more information, visit the USB Home Page.
UUNET has deployed K56flex at 415 points of presence (POPs) in the United States. An additional 85 POPs will be upgraded by year's end.
A Microsoft Network member writes:
MSN have activated K56flex nationwide in the USA and they are currently setting up K56flex on their Australian POPs. Members can go to the memberservices page and check if they need to dial a different POP or continue using the same phone number. There are rumours of X2 being supported later on. I will keep you informed as soon as X2 support is being confirmed.
More information is supposedly available at http://memberservices.msn.com, though a username and password are required to access the page.
PCMCIA Card News
Diamond Multimedia has a Macintosh version of their Supra PC Card.
Europe's Psion Dacom is now offering their 56K PC Card in the U.S.
Simple Technology announced a new 56K PCMCIA card with their patented SimpleJack protector.
Viking Components released the first Type III 56K card with 10BaseT Ethernet. Phone lines and Ethernet cables can be plugged directly into the card without using adapters of any kind.
Xircom's 10/100 Ethernet+56K combo card won PC Computing's MVP award at Comdex.
Computer Shopper has reviews of the Boca MD56I, Cardinal Connecta, Diamond SupraExpress, Hayes Accura, IBM Internet Kit, Logicode Quicktel, Motorola ModemSURFR, Practical Peripherals, U.S. Robotics Sportster, and Zoom FaxModem. For these and other 56K modem reviews, visit the 56K reviews page.
If you're interested in the performance 56K owners are getting from their modems, visit the 56K Speed Survey. I updated it this weekend with twelve more reviews, and added pages for Garnet and E-Tech.
Several of the reader reviews note that they were able to increase their throughput under Windows 95 by changing their MTU settings. (See the Motorola, Supra, and Zoom reviews.) The Max MTU fix is discussed in the John Navas 28800/56K FAQ, and on NetPro's page for their TweakDUN program.
ISP news
GTE Networking announced support for K56flex at 400 of its U.S. POPs.
Carmen Noble of PC Week looks at ISP support for bonding modems. EarthLink and MindSpring are two of the national ISPs planning to support bonding speeds up to 112K.
An AOL press release discusses their recent x2 upgrades, mentioned in last Friday's news.
Erol's is upgrading to 56K today. It turns out that one of their emails to customers mentioned 56K.COM, which explains the flurry of emails from Erol's customers lately. One reader even sent me a copy of the email. I always appreciate referrals, and I encourage other ISPs to direct their customers to 56K.COM.
56K.COM is written and maintained by Les Jones. Artwork by Mark Maxwell. Copyright 1997 Softwords.
