Dublin, Ireland-based Cornel Electronics Ltd announced at Networks 92 that it has joined the band of suppliers offering V.fast modem products before the standard has been finalised. Back in April, it emerged that Telebit Corp and Motorola Codex had high-speed modems in the wings, but – unlike Telebit which has decided to add refinements to the PEP multi-carrier scheme Cornel has opted for the latter’s path and is sticking as closely as possible to the approach being taken by the CCITT for V.fast. The task must have been made easier by the fact that Brian O’Sullivan, Cornel technical marketing director, is on the CCITT committee developing the standard. The new product, the A481C, is a data pump aimed at OEM customers wanting to build V.fast modems. It uses the single carrier multi-dimensional coding modulation scheme being developed by the CCITT, while the company reckons that the product can be enhanced and upgraded as V.fast is defined, since the operating code is stored in EPROM. Initially, modem designers using it can offer dial-up rates from 300bps to 19.2Kbps, with provision for rates above 24.4Kbps. The product incorporates speech processing capabilities, with selectable compression rates down to 4.8Kbps, using the CELP algorithm. An ISDN interface has been incorporated, which exploits the high-speed serial input-output bus. The A481C is ready now in volume, but Cornel won’t talk about pricing.
