Tuesday, October 6

The Scotsman reports on Dixon's launch of Freeserve, a free Internet service in Britain.

PCTel is suing Motorola over alleged patent infringements related to HSP modems, according to News.com. Motorola sued PCTel last month over similar technology claims.

Motorola discontinued their retail modem line earlier this year. I recently found a list of the discontinued products.

Cable modems

Adam Feuerstein gushes about his cable modem experience in the San Francisco Business Times.

Jim Davis of News.com reports that @Home is moving to the retail channel to promote cable modem use.

USA Today's Kevin Maney looks at the skirmish between traditional ISPs and cable companies over who will control access to America's living rooms. Another Maney article, "Cable Modems Surge," examines cable's conquest over DSL. The article includes data from Forrester Research indicating that cable modem use in the U.S. will reach 700,000 homes by the end of 1998, and about 13 million homes by the end of 2002.

Have you posted your test results on the V.90 Speed Survey?

New on the Modem Classifieds Board

There are lots of 3Com/USR modems on the Classifieds Board today.

• Todd has an x2/V.90 3Com BigPicture video voice fax modem for $95.
• R Masters is looking for a loving home for his USR Courier x2/V.90 daughtercard to upgrade older Couriers.

Claude Kalid is selling a USR Courier I-Modem for $150. This is a combination 128K ISDN terminal adapter and x2/V.90 modem. And get this: with normal 56K modems, your friend would only get a maximum of 33.6 when dialing you directly. You can plug the I-Modem into an ISDN line, and your friend can dial into you with his x2 or V.90 modem and get 56K speeds! Great for person-to-person file transfers, videoconferencing, or head-to-head gaming.

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Friday, October 9

I've ordered the new web server for 56K.COM. I should be able to move the web pages over next week, and transfer the www.56k.com domain to the new IP address the following week. The new server will be dedicated to running 56K.COM exclusively, so it should provide much better performance. I'm also changing to a new web hosting company with more bandwidth.

V.90 upgrades

Greg Peng was the first to note that Hayes has a V.90 upgrade for the Hayes Optima

Phil Houghton discovered that the Tashika modem from Software Warehouse UK is the same as the Modular Technology modem, and accepts the same upgrade.

Min Communications has released V.90 upgrades for the Garnet modems.

Edge now has V.90 firmware for KTX modems.

Owners of the Swallow and Sparrow modems can get V.90 upgrades from Cyber-A.

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