Now that the 56Kbps high speed modem battle is seemingly over (see Top Stories), where will hostilities break out next? Well, there’s the new broadband communications technologies such as Digital Subscriber Line for a start. Rockwell International Corp has already come up with a proprietary flavor, called CDSL. 3Com Corp spokesman, Bob Ingols, believes that these kind of duels are inevitable in the highly competitive network access market. But even with the analog modem standards battle over, there is still going to be a large upgrade cost for some of the companies involved, according to 3Com. Rockwell Semiconductor Corp and Lucent Technologies have only just began to ship software upgradable digital signal processors with their modem products, and so a number installed K56Flex modems out on the market will have to have their chipsets replaced, costing the companies that have sold K56Flex modems, or remote access servers that use the new hybrid K56Flex/x2 standard V.PCM. 3Com is insisting that its software upgrade will be free, and says it should work on all x2 equipment it has sold.
