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What Happened to v.92 Support for Dial-up Users?
crhylove asks: "For those of us suckers still on dial up, for whatever the reason, v.92 and v.44 compression may offer a substantial increase in bandwidth, especially if you are someone needing to upload lots of files. Also, it would eliminate the need for Callwave for those of us who have to stay connected all the time. v.92 has been out for over a year now, and I don't know of a single ISP in my area that provides v.92 service. So, Slashdot, what the hell happened to V.92? What do we do about it?"
Many ISPs (myself included) use 3com Total Control equipment. In order to upgrade to v.92, it's much more than a flash update. We have to replace our network management cards (NMC's) with more powerful (and expensive) HiperNMC's. We also have to ditch all our quad-modem cards that have served us so well for so many years, in favor of HiperDSP modems. Many of our Hiper Access Router cards have get more RAM and flash memory. On top of that, many of us need new chassis or power supplies to handle the extra load. Lastly, we need to purchase service contracts from 3com resellers to get access to the software.
Oh, and the software upgrade hasn't been released from Beta yet!
I'm hearing it will be a month or so before it's out. The 3com marketing machine is warming up, so you'll be hearing more soon.
I also understand many Cisco-based ISP's are unable to upgrade to the full V.92/v.44 feature set without replacing a lot of hardware.
I don't mean to rag on Cisco, but if the ISP is using Cisco Access Servers, the firmware upgrades are a scary thing.
Cisco had a V.92 firmware upgrade for their Access Servers available in July. This (2001) July. We had to upgrade the IOS to an experimental version to get the upgrade (for V.92) to work, but that experimental version wouldn't hang up the modems after they had been used. It was a nightmare.
This could be a reason the ISP's are slow in supporting V.92, since many ISP's tend to use Cisco gear on their network.