Why Modems are Frustrating

Modems have become the focus of our disappointment with networks for many reasons:

• It takes a long time for a modem to make a dial-up connection
• The modem link is slow once the connection is established
• In many areas, no affordable alternatives to traditional modems are available yet
• Modem technology does not improve noticeably from year to year
• Modems cause us to miss important phone calls
• Modems make funny noises
• The name "modem" is geeky and boring
• Did I mention that modems are slow?

The history of modems probably planted the seeds of our discontent. Many of us began using the Net at home years ago when modems ran at speeds of 9600 bits per second (bps) or lower. But as the Net grew in popularity, the industry worked quickly to build new standards and hardware. Soon 14,400 bps (14.4 kbps) modems appeared, and we noticed a significant increase in performance. Then 19.2 kbps modems arrived, followed shortly by 28.8 kbps modems, and the performance improvements were obvious each time. Meanwhile, as the technology continued to improve, the cost of connecting to the Net from home stayed the same and sometimes even dropped.

V.92 - A Better Mousetrap?

The industry's latest attempt to breathe life into traditional modem technology is a standard known as V.92. V.92 attempts to improve on several of the shortcomings of the current V.90 technology, promising

• a noticeable improvement in speed
• a much shorter connect time, greatly reducing modem "squawking and spitting"
• the ability to handle voice as well as data (i.e., coexistence with call-waiting services)

The industry generally claims that V.92 modems can outperform current modems by anywhere from 20% to 40%.

"Even on a good connection, [V.90 modem] data transfer rates struggle to reach 30 kbps. The new V.92 should deliver 48 kbps download speed on the best connections." [source: "www.it-director.com/00-07-06-2.html" (offline)]

Of course, we have all learned by now that getting the "best connection" requires both ends work together. Until ISPs supported V.92 on their side, that shiny new V.92 at home didn't do us much good.

Likewise, the problem of poor line quality remains. Today my current V.90 modem connects to my current V.90-capable ISP at a measly 26.4 kbps, and even the fastest downloads rarely exceed that data rate. It will be interesting to see whether V.92 can consistently overcome this limitation.

Conclusion

Modems seem doomed to fall short of our high expectations for network performance. Compared to the speed at which we surf the Net from corporate intranets, accessing the Internet at home via dial-up has become almost unbearably slow.