What Happened to v.92 Support for Dial-up Users? 14
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?"
3com Slow out of the gates (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Buggy software (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Isn't that your job? (Score:1)
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.
If the upgrades needed aren't in your budget, than you didn't do your budget properly. Hardware shouldn't be considered to have a lifespan much beyond 2 years nowadays.
The main thing is to setup test modem pools and let people use them at their own (pre-warned!) risk. Don't be like my ISP and test new things on the main network (unless you want lots of angry customers!).
Re:Isn't that your job? (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/...
Re:Isn't that your job? (Score:2)
At least in my part of the US, getting an ISDN line and accompanying ISP service would cost around three times what it costs to have a dedicated analog phone line ($25/mo) and an unlimited-access PPP acount ($20/mo) that I can keep connected 24x7.
And of course, DSL and cable aren't available in a lot of areas.
Re:Isn't that your job? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Isn't that your job? (Score:1)
Re:Isn't that your job? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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.
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? (Score:1)
Heh... I'd completely forgotten about that. We've got a fair number of customers on that. It's a lot more feasible with big terminal servers, though, and that incurs a cost--you can't shtogun across multiple terminal servers, so the ISP has to eat the cost of high-end gear up front. In our case, that's not a problem, since our last purchase was a consolidation of a bank of Lucent gear.
The only problem I've seen in that Windows (read as: the OS used by > 90% of my customers) doesn't seem to want to sync the two modems up (reliably) unless the two modems are using the same driver, and the majority of WinModems (at least the Lucent ones) will only allow one instance per PCI bus.
So... you're left looking for hardware modems. I could rant for hours about how customers don't want to pay the extra $20 for a used USR Courier (or another -decent- hardware modem), and then bitch about connection quality, but I'll save that for another day. :) Suffice it to say that those people will never benefit from shotgunning, since WinModems tend to suck at it.
I agree, though. Every ISP should support it. Every modern terminal server does. Any terminal server that supports ISDN does. It's just a configuration change (turn on MPP support), and it can generate a lot of revenue (charge an extra $10/mo per port--it's still cheaper than ISDN or DSL) and a lot of happy customers, if they're willing to buy decent client-side kit.
How to upgrade to V.92 from Linux ? (Score:1)
Re:How to upgrade to V.92 from Linux ? (Score:1)
A solution in search of a problem (Score:1)