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?"

Comments

Re:Isn't that your job?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

I certainly believe stability is FAR more important than increased speed, and being on the @ss end of an ISP, I'd much rather have a reliable connection -- but there's a limit to how long you can blame the vendors.

If the vendors won't release updates in a reasonable manner (IE: *NOT* require you to purchase all new equipment), then dump them for someone who will.

And blame whom, then? One needs hardware to connect, and a decent terminal server is not cheap hardware by a long shot--you can't exactly build (a scalable) one from commodity components and free software. The last one my company purchased was a $1.2M investment (several hundred digital modems and a few dozen PRI ports). Liquidating it on eBay and blowing that much money again on a piece of equipment strictly for an incremental improvement on the customer side isn't an option--not because I don't care about my customers, but because it isn't economically feasible to do this every time J Random Vendor happens to lose a clue on upgrades.

And, yes, we got screwed on the deal. We also have to replace our modem cards (and the shelf controller!!) to put v.92 on the wire. Everyone involved (except for the vendor, waiting with open arms for our next purchase order) is pissed about the ordeal, but there's really not a damn thing we can do.

It's not like you can evaluate equipment on the basis of what standards will be ratified N years down the road, since we don't know which standards will be ratified. We can guess, but the industry has been surprised before.

If the upgrades needed aren't in your budget, than you didn't do your budget properly.

This isn't an upgrade. This is a complete solution replacement, and almost all the vendors dropped the ball on this one, so shut your pie hole.

Hardware shouldn't be considered to have a lifespan much beyond 2 years nowadays.

Bullshit. Absolute, complete, and total grade-A bullshit. This is the first upgrade in at least five years that has completely broken the server-side of the ISP. V.90 was a firmware update for every major vendor (except for 3com, which never gets upgrades right). The per-modem cost of a decent terminal server is astronomical, and no company can recover that cost in two years and maintain a decent customer-to-modem ratio.

Now, maybe your PC doesn't have a lifespan beyond 2 years, but networking hardware Just Isn't That Way.

I suggest you stay on the @ss end of your ISP for now. You don't appear to understand what is actually going on.

The real reason most ISPs do not support v.92 right now is bacause there are no reliable server-side implementations. 3com has an update package consisting of "replace everything at 80% of the cost you just invested last year". Alcatel says "replace everything, oh, and, by the way, we changed all the part numbers again, so your catalogs are out of date for the third time this year, also, since this is new and better equipment, be prepared to pay 20% more than you did last year". ciscoSystems says "here, this might crash your terminal server and void your TAC onsite agreement, but, then again, it might work flawlessly--do ya feel lucky, punk?". Lucent is still trying to iron out the bugs in its v.90 implementation, and they've been contemplating EOLing the TNT modem cards for years now--they've only held off, as they don't have a replacement part that works yet.

Believe me, there are far more factors in this equation than "$ISP doesn't want to fork out $20 and a few minutes to upload some firmware". Most of us just have our hands tied behind our backs because we just bought a buttload of equipment a year or so ago, and, with the economy being what it is, don't have the funds to replace all of it.

FWIW, I connect via dialup at home. I can't say that I'm waiting for v.92 with bated breath. v.90 is fine for me, and, from what I've seen, v.92 is only incremental--barely noticeable except in absolutely perfect conditions. Basically, if your phone line and ISP are such that you can achieve the highest-quality v.92 connection between the two points, you can probably get DSL, due to the stringent line quality standards for v.92. With that in mind, a lot of companies (including the hardware vendors) are pushing DSL a lot harder than v.92 for customers that want better upload speeds.

Re:Isn't that your job?

[threephaseboy]

Also the per-minute costs on ISDN push the price up to about the same as a frame-relay, in my area at least.