May 1

Motorola has found a buyer for its consumer modem division. The consumer modem division, along with the SURFR brand names, now belong to a group of international investors named CPATH, Inc. The deal is expected to be completed on May 8th. Motorola will provide technical support and V.90 upgrades for modems sold prior to the purchase. Motorola has a press release, and PC Week has an article.

A USA Today article, "The Need for Speed," looks at today's high-speed access options.

New @ 56K.COM

• The new search engine I installed Wednesday has been replaced by an even newer search engine, Xavatoria. The new search facility pre-indexes the site for much faster searches, and supports AltaVista-like queries. Later: the new search engine started acting flakey once it was in widespread use. I've restored the previous search engine until the problem is resolved. If anyone knows of a good search engine that can handle 500+ web pages, shoot me an email.
• The Modem Price Shopper is now searchable from a form on the front page of the site.
• I've added a domain name search tool to the front page of the site. Find out if the domain name you want is still available.
• To better manage these features and others, I plan to post a redesigned front page on Monday.
• The links on the left side of the page now use JavaScript. Pass your mouse over the links to see a brief description at the bottom of your browser window. If this causes problems in your browser, let me know.

April 29

Paul Siegmund notes HP 4.31 firmware for their Lucent LT Winmodems.

V.90 upgrades

ELSA has new V.90 modem firmware.

Steven Kovacs noticed that Diamond Multimedia V.90 upgrades have slipped from April to May.

Lance Douglas found a GVC Canada page that lists their V.90 upgrade date as May 30, 1998. The upgrades are only for modems sold in Canada.

Cristiano Reis Monteiro wrote to say that Genius has V.90 upgrades for their K56flex modems.

New @ 56K.COM

I've installed a new search engine at 56K.COM. The new engine is based on Site-Search 2.00 by Krishnan Jayakrishnan. New features include:

• better speed than Simple Search, largely due to the ability to exclude certain directories (such as cgi-bin) from the search
• matches are listed with the page title, modification date, file name, and a short extract that shows the search term in context
• you can do a secondary search within the matches to narrow down the search

April 27

InfoWorld is warning its readers not to upgrade their K56flex modems to V.90 until their ISP upgrades. 56K.COM's V.90 Upgrade FAQ has more details on the subject, under the K56flex section.

The 66-satellite global Iridium communications network is nearing completion with the launch of the last five satellites.

Brian McWilliams of PCWorld News Radio interviewed Terry Manning of Zoom Telephonics about the V.90 standard.

V.90 upgrades

Amquest is back at www.amquestmodem.com, following their purchase by KDS. Better still, they have a V.90 upgrade for their 56K modems. (Thanks, Andy Youstic.)

Several readers noted that Jaton has V.90 upgrades.

Multi-Tech has V.90 upgrades for many of its 56K modems.

Zoltrix has instructions for fixing a problem with Dial-Up Networking caused by some V.90 firmware. (Later: Zoltrix.com seems to be changing IP addresses. Try this temporary address: http://206.25.142.50/v90fix.htm)

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