56kbps modems still not up to speed

The 56Kbps modem standard war is limping to its conclusion. But it still leaves questions unanswered - what speed do you actually get and is ISDN a better bet anyway? Dennis Jarrett reports

The so-called 'battle' over a standard for 56Kbps modems is stuttering to a conclusion of sorts. Products supporting the two rival technologies are now widely available, while many Internet service providers are also offering one or both of the proprietary standards.

But 56Kbps remains a theoretical maximum, hampered by the variability of phone-line cable between the server and the user.

And although both sides are now promising future-proofed products, featuring flash upgradability, an internally agreed standard is still at least six months away.

By that time there will be intense pressure from high-speed alternatives. Hardware prices are falling in the ISDN market, even if BT feels unable to move on connection charges. And the new generation of very fast ADSL modems will be following closely behind.

So there is considerable incentive for the proponents of 56K to keep the ball rolling and encourage the customers to buy.

Originally there were three companies which independently developed 56K technology. Lucent and Rockwell decided to pool their contributions to produce the K56Flex modem technology, whereas the US Robotics system is called x2.

Although x2 and K56Flex are incompatible, both these technologies take advantage of the fact that the telecommunications infrastructure is now primarily a digital network - and so it is no longer dominated by the speed limitation of around 35Kbps, inherent in analogue lines.

The principle is to remove the 'quantization noise' that occurs on a standard analogue-to-digital conversion. This will reduce line noise and increase theoretical speed.

There is no equivalent signal change in digital-to-analogue conversions, which is why the higher speed is feasible in one direction only. So a server - at a corporate site, or at an Internet provider -must connect to the PSTN using a digital switch and a digital line.

The client can then receive at a data rate of up to 56Kbps. For transfers in the other direction, the client modem performs the analogue-to-digital conversion that introduces line noise.

Motorola's Les Brown, chairman of the International Telecommunication Union committee currently working on a standard, says the marketplace is pushing the body for a 56Kbps standard. 'It's going to be intolerable having two proprietary systems out there that don't talk to each other,' he reasons.

A draft recommendation will be ready in September. This will be circulated internationally for comment, but full approval should follow, almost as a formality, at the next meeting of the relevant ITU study group in January 1998. But there is some scepticism about how realistic that schedule is, not least because it took four years to develop the current V.34 standard for 28.8Kbps modems, and there are significant technical differences between K56Flex and x2.

The most likely problems are political, though. Nearly all the nominees to the ITU study group are associated with the K56Flex consortium, but they cannot ignore USR's market position.

US Robotics was first to market, with a 56Kbps modem - a Sportster variant appeared in January 1997 with a 56K flash upgrade option - and undoubtedly x2 is outselling K56Flex.

US Robotics has persuaded most of the major US and UK Internet service providers to offer x2 and now claims that more than 18 million ISP subscribers can surf the Internet at up to 56Kbps via x2 access.

But to some extent the political infighting represents the corporate versus consumer markets. USR is the dominant supplier to the home user via the Sportster and Courier, while K56Flex technology is widely supported among the corporate specialists in the market, such as Racal, Cisco and Shiva.

K56Flex also has some adherents among consumer modem makers, notably Hayes and MultiTech. But Hayes also has a subsidiary that is hedging its bets, making modems that follow both standards.

The situation became even more complicated in March, when the x2 developer US Robotics was acquired by 3Com - a major supplier to corporates and formerly an enthusiastic backer of K56Flex.

3Com has since decided to swing its full weight behind x2, talking about this technology as 'the de facto industry standard'.

Says 3Com's European vice president Mark De Simone: 'We will see an ITU standard delivered a lot earlier, due to x2's emergence.'

But Dennis Hayes, chief executive of Hayes, thinks the ITU draft standard 'will probably be closer to K56Flex than x2' because more modem makers support K56Flex.

'It is important for users to buy a product with the most ports to connect into - by the middle of this year this will be K56Flex,' claims Hayes.

Dataquest estimates that 70% of modems being shipped now are based on Rockwell and Lucent chipsets, which implies a head start for K56Flex.

On the other hand, there is substantial perceived user demand for more bandwidth. For the consumer, there is a lot of appeal in high-speed Internet connection with a one-way bias. But John Gerrard, research director at the Gartner Technology Centre, points out that there is a corporate market too.

'The most tangible payback for 56K will come from email and from file transfers such as Notes replications,' says Gerrard. 'And those are classic applications for the corporate user.'

Gerrard sees 56K modems as a realistic alternative - but one that will have to sit alongside other high-speed technologies such as ISDN, ADSL and cable.

'I'm going to assume that eventually [56Kbps] will work as advertised. But it isn't going to shorten set-up times and a lot of latency problems won't be fixed by 56Kbps,' he argues.

While the dial-up environment remains important to both corporates and consumers, 56Kbps modems look to be the inexpensive option for all types of user. 'For all the failings of analogue phone lines, they're plentiful and cheap,' says IT consultant Simon Potter, an acknowledged expert on modems.

But until the ITU standards have been ratified, and unless today's modems come with a guarantee of compliance, there seems little advantage to 56Kbps.

The hype has been intense. And a California lawyer called Donald Driscoll has filed a suit against several modem manufacturers and retailers, charging that they duped consumers - his mother, for one - into buying technology that can't deliver.

He argues that there are simply too few ISPs providing 56Kbps access to warrant the advertising claims, particularly coming from US Robotics, about superfast downloads. Driscoll does have something of a reputation for filing consumer action lawsuits, including 21 in May 1995 alone which argued that computer monitors aren't as wide as manufacturers claim.

But the general principles apply -you cannot achieve fast downloads if the sender doesn't support 56Kbps technology, and the two 56Kbps modem technologies are simply incompatible.

More significant is the practical speed restriction. In the US the FCC has imposed a 53Kbps limit on dial-up communication.

While there are no formal restrictions in the UK, in practice the quality of telephone lines is going to limit throughput to something rather less than 50Kbps.

As dial-up provider Cix puts it: 'Modem speeds of 56Kbps are rarely achievable - customers should view anything above 33.6Kbps as a bonus.'

And for some phone exchanges, particularly away from modern cabling in urban areas, even 33.6Kbps will be a rarity.

Equally practical problems may harm the 56Kbps' appeal for larger companies. For instance, there can only be one analogue-to-digital conversion in the phone network along the path of the call between the server modem and the client modem. Some PBXs, however, perform an analogue-to-digital conversion that would remove the technical advantage of a user's 56Kbps modem.

'For the corporate IT department looking after small remote sites or people on the move 56Kbps modems will be a cheap way to boost download speeds from the network to users,' says Potter.

'If the remote user is receiving more than they are sending, especially if they take long downloads like Notes replications, 56Kbps will be cost-effective.'

But Potter argues that ISDN is already looking like a sounder option for users at fixed remote sites, in any case. 'The main issue in throughput is not modem speed but latency,' he says.

With ISDN links, latency is minimal. 'But there's a minimum amount of time it takes two modems to set up for communicating data, and 56Kbps modems improve on that only slightly,' argues Potter.

? Extra reporting by Simon Bignell of Business Computer World.

x2 versus K56Flex Deadly rivals
Developed by Rockwell, the k56 has the patronage of the Open 56k forum, which includes most modem manufacturers, including Motorola, Hayes and Pace. The forum companies represent more than 70% of the global modem communications industry.
In the other corner is USR, US Robotics' x2 standard. USR is the only notable absentee from the forum and stole a march on its rivals by getting x2 56Kbps modems on the market first. But the x2 standard could eventually be eclipsed by its K56Flex rival.

The issues An explanation
The advent of 56Kbps modems doesn't mean, sadly, that everyone now has instant high-speed access to the Web. The two new standards must be supported by both the modem and the ISP used to access the Web for 56Kbps connections to be successful. That is unless, of course, the user - say, a large organisation - is sufficiently equipped to plug directly into the Net. Otherwise, the bad news is that, as yet, only one ISP - UUNet Pipex - can support the x2 and K56 Flex connection speeds.
No doubt CompuServe, AOL, Microsoft and the rest will soon decide which of the two technologies, if not both, they will support. But until then subscribers will have to put up with 33.3Kbps connections, regardless of the speed of their modem.
If, as a company, you don't already have your own Internet gateway, and your modem configuration isn't upgradable to 56Kbps, it may be wise to wait until more ISPs announce which standard they will be supporting. If your modem is of a type which can be upgraded and you don't mind switching your ISP to Pipex, get that 56Kbps code now. For surfing the Net via a standard phone line, there is no substitute.