Wednesday, September 23

Broadcom has developed a single chip that will perform all of the functions necessary for a cable modem, according to Wired.

Brian McWilliams notes a 7am Free NewsWire story, "Windows Limitation Curbs Web Browsing." Windows 95's TCP/IP stack will only go 32 hops deep, so if a web site or other Internet resource is more than 32 hops away, you'll get a "host unreachable" error. The article discusses a registry hack that fixes the problem.

Dan Mandic of Hayes Australia notes that their web site has Australian V.90 upgrades for Mac and Windows.

Dan also notes that Hayes Phone Tools 2.0 for Windows is available as a free download for all Hayes modems.

Computer Peripherals International has released the ViVa RAS/56, a four-port V.90 PCI card for Windows NT RAS servers.

New message board

The 56K.COM message board died mysteriously a few weeks ago for no apparent reason. Re-uploading backup files didn't help, and other uses of the WWWThreads software reported similar problems. That software was never particularly reliable, so I decided to replace it rather than reinstall it.

The new message board is powered by Ultimate Bulletin Board. UBB appears to be much more robust than WWWThreads, and much more scalable to a large number of messages. Like the old board, the new one uses colored icons to show which message have been posted since you last visited. Even better, it will move threads with new messages to the top of the page for quick retrieval.

New: V.90 Speed Survey

In its day the old 56K Speed Survey was very useful in showing what kinds of connect and download speeds 56K users were seeing in real world results. It also proved to some doubting Thomases that, yes, people really were getting better than 33.6 with their 56K modems.

Now that V.90 is a formal standard, it's time for a new survey. In order to take the V.90 Modem Speed Survey, both you and your ISP must use V.90 modems. As before, you should include your particular modem model, your initial connect speed, and most importantly your FTP download results. The instructions explain how to do the tests, and why they're done the way are. 

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Friday, September 25

Sales of 56K modems will double in 1999, according to a Point-Topic press release and report. What's more, 1999 won't even be the peak of 56K market share. Tim Johnson of Point-Topic notes that in 1998 the market was deluged with a surplus 6.5 million 56K modem chips. That glut has caused low modem prices, and slowed introduction of V.90 modems as manufacturers clear out their inventories of older modems. The subscription-only report has even more detailed predictions of 56K market share and market value that I found impressive.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports 3Com's profits dropped 49% compared to the same time last year, but still managed to beat estimates. 3Com blames slow modem sales and decreasing prices for the decreased profitability.

Michael Pioso writes:

BOCA Tidalwave External v.90 modem has disconnection problems under NT4 and probably other OS'es as well when talking to the latest beta drivers for Livingston Switches. You must change default init string to: AT&F0D0 to keep from being dumped on a completely random basis. Took several weeks to figure this out, because you must init modem using at&f0, save, shut down, restart and add the D0 to the string for it to work. I have no understanding as to why the simple changing of the init string to at&F0D0 does NOT do the same thing, but it will NOT work...

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