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ITU Agrees On V.92 standard
An unnamed correspondent writes: "The ITU has
agreed on the V.92 standard. The 3 enhancements are
faster upstream (max of 48 kbit/s!), reduced connect times,
and internet call waiting. Unfortunately, final approval is
scheduled for November 2000. If you can't get broadband, this may be the next best thing."
Gotta correct you here... ISDN is laughably expensive (coming from someone who has 128kbps to BigPong Direct)... but the line charges are capped: AU$275/month for 64kbps and AU$435/month for 128kbps - for a "permanent connection" (i.e. your line is dialled up to the one number, and when it disconnects it redials that)...
Pathetic though. But the satellite lag is non existant... I can get 15ms ping times Melbourne to Canberra out of ISDN, unlike POTS :)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
"Broadband" is the wave of the future! POTS is good for fast and easy voice transmission, but admit it: it's dead for Internet.
For you users sitting at home with the luxury of DSL and cable modems, sure. But what about travelling users, laptops, etc. No reason why we can't milk every bit out of the PSTN that we can, bandwidthwise, for those users who don't always have the luxury of "broadband". (even if the technology ain't perfect)
Under win98, net performance is mediocre but I think we can blame that on the win tcp stack. [If John Carmack says it sucks, that's enough evidence for me :]
That being said, I live in a fifty year old house with fifty year old wiring and fifty year old telephone equipment on the poles in the alley.
If you or your friends are getting poor performance, try another ISP [not aol btw]
Also, stay away from winmodems!!! I paid $90 for this generic hardware modem, but its been well worth it over the last year.
I would like to agree. Modems were fine when telephone lines were the only signal that could transmit digital data to/from the common household and text-based BBSes were the norm.
But things have changed. Now that the internet has come about and has the capability to serve multimedia data to millions of people at once, 20-some-odd thousand bits per second just isn't going to keep up.
I personally have to question the motives of the telephone companies. They claim (or used to claim) that all the modem traffic was saturating their networks to the point of reducing the quality of service for voice callers. They are ticked that ISPs are using *their* telephone networks for essentially free while charging their $20 a month for internet access. This is the primary reason, I expect, that our telephone networks (here in the US) haven't really seen any additional upgrades or accomidations to increase the quality of service for modem users.
DSL? I think it *could* be the magic ingredient for widespread low-cost internet access if the telco's would only let it. Here in Albuquerque, we've been promised DSL by various companies for the last few years and still there is none available for private consumers. NONE. Rumour has it that our local telephone monopoly, US West, is denying DSL providers access to the lines. If anyone from around here can provide more info or prove me wrong, please do.
Meanwhile, I'm stuck with a maximum of 28.8 despite my V.90 modem, because all the fucking phone lines in this part of town are multiplexed and AD/DA converted a few times before the signal even sees a CO.
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Programming, is like sex.
I live in South Jersey, and this area has been slated for broadband access "in the next three months" since early 1998. Our local cable company who was bought out by Comcast no longer even mentions the idea of bringing cable Internet to this area.
I spoke with a person who works at Bell Atlantic and he said the demand for DSL in this area is huge but Bell doesn't want to put the money in for upgrading the backbone. They don't believe they'll profit even with the large demand. Far from it: in many areas around here, they're doing some "splitting" trick with the phone lines, breaking the 64 kbit channel into two 32 kbit ones. Of course, this makes dialup access suck like hell. I almost cream myself when I get 3K/sec on binary downloads.
ISDN is nearly impossible to afford around here since "residential" plans aren't offered. All the plans are aimed for medium sized businesses and are priced accordingly.
At this point, I'd love to have anything: cable, DSL, or even cheap ($50/month or less) ISDN, but it ain't happening. So for you who think DSL is "everywhere," think again. it's not, and not even close.
Intrestingly enough, Bell Atlantic says that DSL will be available in my area "in the next six months," but I have a feeling any area which does not currently offer it carries that message.
The ITU just agreed on the V.94 Standard. This a great improvement on the older V.92, which allow only 56 kbps of download, while V.94 allows 58 kbps. That's a huge improvement of 2 kbps, allowing 1 free Meg of download every hour!
My point is: who needs those improvements? 14.4 to 28.8 gave you a factor of two. V.90 to V.92 gives you almost nothing (add teh fact that the line noise will likely eliminate all this gain). It's like upgrading from a 700 MHz CPU to a 750 MHz. Except for marketing, I really don't see the idea.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Last week my local central office installed DSL. I have been using it since. In fact, just about everyone I know in my city has been using DSL.
"Broadband" is the wave of the future! POTS is good for fast and easy voice transmission, but admit it: it's dead for Internet.
Sorry to disappoint you, but DSL *DOES* run on POTS by definition. That's the good thing about DSL. It doesn't require re-wiring, and your POTS will do. You can have a good explanation of DSL and its variations (ADSL, HDSL, SDSL, and others) here.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
There is no magic bullet that will make modems run significantly faster that 33.6 kbps. For a given bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio, you can push only so many bits through a channel. V.90 technology cheats this by exploiting the fact that a subscriber's telephone line is not limited to 3 kHz of bandwidth, and is directly connected to a CODEC (coder/decoder) at a modern central office switch. If that isn't true, you are going to have to live with V.34 class speeds.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
'Wideband' - Broadcasting the same signal over many bands at once.
'Narrowband' - using a very narrow band to transmit. Sort of opposite of wideband.
'Broadband' - The use of multiple 'bands' for transmission (or reception). ie: cable TV is broadband. Using multuiple carrier frequencies to divide a medium into many different bands.
Baseband - using a single, base channel for all transmission. ie: Ethernet.
Please not that although there are obvious real-world examples of how broadband has a higher capacity than baseband, neither definnition has anything whatsoever to do with speed of data transmition.
Your cable modem is 'broadband' only because it modulates it's signal up into RF for transmission on the cable line. Technically, it doestn' really have 'broadband' characteristics; it can't receive on multiple channels at once.
If you had a 100baseT ethernet connection to your house, that would still be baseband, not broadband (hey.. that's what the 'base' stands for)
Perhaps one could consider CDPD data (19kbps or whatever) to the palmpilot or something, whatever it is, to be broadband. It is modulated up over a broadband medium (space).
The average local loop length is much longer in the United States than in Europe.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Dozens of people have complained to me over the last year or two, about their inability to connect to their 56k account at anything higher than 19200bps. That's 19200bps! I haven't seen connections like that since late in 1994!
It's only become worse. I'm still waiting for my DSL and the company that is providing it offered free dial-up service until my DSL is actually installed and running. Only problem? I can't actually connect to a single one of their dial-up numbers. After a flurry of handshaking and choking on signals, both modems give up and I'm left with the recorded voice of the operating piping through my computer, telling me that if I'd like to make a call, perhaps I should hang up and try again.
As long as dial-up providers keep implementing cheap modems to so they can claim "20,000 modems -- no busy signals!", connections will still be poor. Clinging to a v.92 standard is fine, but a lame-duck modem is still a lame-duck modem.
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seumas.com
There are a lot of people on here that seem to think that a new standard for transmission over the POTS is a waste of time because of the availability of DSL/Cable/Whatever.
.net connections to think about. A lot of those use a modem as their uplink. I'm sure they'd welcome an extra 15Kbps upstream!
This is, as usual, a very narrow minded and selfish approach.
Of course internet over POTS is going to survive.
I live in Australia, here we are just beginning trials of DSL, and even when it comes in it'll only be available in metropolitan areas.
Considering we are a country that has some of the most remote internet users (many hundreds of kilometres from the nearest city), I can't see broadband or services with similar speeds for a similar price getting out into the rural areas for a long time! Hence net over POTS lives on!
Then you have to take into consideration all the other third world countries where the internet is only available to a select few. These people aren't going to be getting DSL to their houses like the rich fat americans any time soon!
Next to consider is the average household user. The person who just wants to get/send emails and maybe do a bit of surfing sometimes. Why would they bother with anything other than a V.92 modem?
There's also the people using satellite
With all that, without even mentioning the cost difference between analogue and digital services, I think the humble modem will live a while longer. Even if only half what I've said is valid!
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
Anyone have some good links on exactly how the increased upstream works?
I thought the whole "trick" to v90 was taking advantage of the lack of an analog/digital conversion on the ISP/provider end (straight telco trunks in to NAS equipment), which was why the 56k downstream was possible (64k per channel + robbed bit signaling = 56k).
It's quite obvious the "customer side" is analog though, so how are we scamming 48k upstream?
Does anyone have reliable information about upgrades for existing v.90 modems? This could be quite interesting for a software update, but not very handy (or cost effective) if new modems are needed.
Also, it would be nice if the high and low-speed channels were reversible like the old courier 9600-HSTs. The 9600 and 1200baud channels were reversible to accommodate the direction that needed the highest bandwidth. Is this possible with the mixed analog-digital signaling of a 56k modem?
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Your comment is completely false. The Internet is transparent upon the networking medium. Take a look at RFC1011 "Official Internet Protocols". Basically, IP is used to handle getting a packet somewhere (routing et cetra), and transmission protocols like TCP/UDP are used to handle transfering of data via packets.
TCP/IP does not define any standard protocols in the OSI "Physical" layer. This is the job of the physical network medium itself. In fact, IP has a Maximum Transmission Unit field to specify the maximum transmission or receive unit of the underlying medium -- in other words, how much the given medium can send at a time. Ethernet, being the most common on the Internet, has a MTU of 1500 but this is no means the only possible networking media.
The Internet can and will adapt to any media, even something as unreliable as two cans and a tight string. TCP provides reliability services, allowing the Internet to run on anything -- even a noisy phone line.
Enjoy life, drink beer.