Tuesday, November 3

Are you grouchy because you're not getting enough sleep? Tired because you toss and turn all night? The ITU has the solution you need with the V.90 technical specification. Cost is a mere 87 Francs.

Consumer groups are protesting the closed nature of cable Internet service.

Ascend introduced the high-density Series56 II Digital Modem, a 48-port card for the Ascend MAX remote access servers.

Microsoft is beta testing the first Windows 98 Service Pack.

V.90 Upgrades

Though it isn't listed on the Motorola V.90 web site, there is a Motorola UK V.90 upgrade at ftp://v90.motorola.com/pub/itu/uk_v90.exe.

Other V.90 upgrades:

Billion

Billionton

Computerline

Creative Labs

Digicom S.P.A Italy

(If that list looks curiously alphabetized, it's because I'm re-exploring the web sites of the 200+ modem manufacturers in the Modem Link Board.)

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Newsflashes for Friday, November 6

If you're using a modem with a Rockwell PCI chipset, use AT+MR=2 to report true connect speed (instead of 57600, 115200, and other bogus numbers). For most other Rockwell chipsets, use W2. For U.S. Robotics and most x2 chipsets, all that's necessary is to use AT&F1 in the init string. All of this advice assumes you're using the correct .inf files for Windows 95/98/NT Dial-Up Networking, or the correct modem scripts for Apple's PPP and Remote Access control panels. Otherwise, those programs won't be able to report the correct speed even if you're using the correct init string.

Speaking of which, Mac users looking for Global Village modem scripts: try GV's script locator. (If you're getting the "connecting at an unknown rate" message in Apple's PPP or Remote Access control panels, you need a new script.)

Documentation for the Lucent LT Win Modem has been hard to come by, but Encore has a Lucent LT PCI Win Modem manual in PDF format (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader to open). Though the link to it is labeled as being for the PCI version, the docs don't make any reference to PCI, and I suspect the commands are the same. I've sent an inquiry to Lucent to find out.

Andres Alvarado writes:

A few months ago, I purchased an Acer system that came with a Rockwell RLDL56PDF based modem, Kflex flavor. As soon as V.90 came about, I went out to look for updated drivers/firmware for my modem. Acer doesn't have any, unless it's for an Acer Open modem, not for the modems they preload on their systems. I found a ton of drivers that seemed to match this chipset, or at least I thought, based on the inf structure. I tried them all, but to no avail. In fact, it lowered my connection to 33.6! I even tried making my own infs, as this modem uses two. I tried everything that is stated in your website. Then, I happened to chance on a website, www.radi.com, the Radicom website, which distributes a version of these drivers which are V.90 and Kflex compatible and they state they are for all modems based on the RLDL56PDF. The driver version that they have is 2.1.2.122. I have found a later version, 127, but have not tried it yet. These are for Win 95/98, but they also have a WinNT4 version. Interestingly, this modem is software based as the drivers have no firmware update that I could see. I don't know if this information is concise enough or if it will help anyone, but it has certainly helped me.

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