Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

What Happened to v.92 Support for Dial-up Users?

Posted by Cliff on from the replaced-by-something-better-I-hope dept.

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?"

1 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Isn't that your job? by jbroom · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As tech director for an ISP, yes keeping up with currently used standards is part of my job. The currently used STANDARD for dialup modems is V.90 all over.

    V.92 is a pretty hack. If you have to setup from scratch today, you would obviously be looking for something that does V.92, but if upgrading V.90->V.92 means loads of cash or change of equipment then it is just not worth the hassle.

    Let's face is, the average dialup user is mainly a downloader, not an uploader, the V.92 standard slightly increases the THEORETICAL speed, but the practical speed will probably move (on the uploads) around 5-10%, with the download staying where it is.

    In nearly all areas where V.90 is available from the provider, ISDN is available to the subscriber. If uploading is such a biggie with the end user, he would not be bitching for a 5-10% increase at best, but would be upgrading HIMSELF to an ISDN line, which will not change his running costs, and will get him a nearly 100% speed increase in uploads.

    Throughout most of Europe, users pay for their calls on a per-minute basis. No difference paying (on time) for an analog call than for paying for an ISDN call, hence the end user would want an ISDN link.

    We have around 5000 dialup users (we're small), and I really don't think that it would merit us an expenditure of around $50-100K for *this* upgrade.
    Not a good investment for maybe 50 users to notice. As CTO, I have better ways to spend that cash, even if it was available (which it isn't).
    With analog calls the buck stops at V.90 for us.

    Want something fast? Go to ISDN. Even faster? ADSL/cable/...