Overview of V.90 Modem Standard
The 56K modem war is over, with an important ITU agreement reached February 6th, 1998 in Geneva, Switzerland. Who won? Consumers and ISP's!
A compromise has been officially reached between the two modem camps. Central site equipment makers like Ascend, Cisco, Livingston and 3COM will release new code to allow ISP ports to be ITU V.90 compatible. As soon as ISP's deploy V.90 code at their POPs, users that get flash upgrades to bring their X2 or K56flex modems to run V.90 won't care what kind of central site equipment is at their ISP, both will work. And ISP's everywhere will breath a sigh of relief as they finally can forget about trying to decide to deploy X2 or K56flex central site equipment.
The Final Analog Modem Standard
The V.90 modem standard will persevere as the king of the hill for analog modem speed, for a much longer reign than the very popular V.34 standard enjoyed. Very likely, V.90 will be the final analog modem speed standard. And, there are going to be a lot of V.90 modems sold. Analysts predict that modem sales will grow to about 75 million modems sold per year by 2000. Almost all of these will be V.90.
Long Lasting
For tens of millions of people, using a V.90 modem will be how they connect to the internet for many years to come. Even given the progress, promotion and promise of other high bandwidth technologies like cable modems and DSL, many countries and rural USA will not have the infrastructure put in place to benefit from bi-directional cable or DSL. The V.90 modem will be the high speed conduit of choice to get on the internet.
Interoperable or inoperable?
A standard is only useful if any V.90 client modem can reliably connect to any manufacturers V.90 compliant central site modem. The Feb 9 issue of Computer Reseller News and the Feb 13 PC Week report some posturing is going on with 3COM/USR and Rockwell not doing interoperability testing with each others equipment. Hello? Don't these guys understand "standard"? Hopefully they get their acts together soon and do what is good for the industry and consumers, build equipment that interoperate; else the V.90 standard could fallback to the K56flex vs. X2 days. Been there, done that. Come on you guys, shake hands and get the V.90 standard off to a good start. BTW-Lucent and 3Com announced on Jan 20 that they've begun V.90 interoperability testing.
That was quick! Feb 17 Rockwell and 3COM announce successful interoperability testing is completed.