Intel Corp, Santa Clara has halted production of most of its modem range to work on only two lines. The move eliminates Intel’s existing cellular Personal Computer Memory Card International Association-compliant modem, international PCMCIA modem, US PCMCIA modem and low-end internal modem lines, although the company says it will continue to sell both internal and external SatisFaxtion modems. Instead, according to the company’s PCMCIA product manager for Europe, Tom Calvert, the company will launch two new ranges: a voice-data line and a ‘controllerless’ line for use with Pentium personal computers. Both will come in a range of form factors, including PCMCIA. Along with the voice-data modem comes a ‘standard’, called TrueSpeech, although Calvert said he was not sure that anybody else had promised support for it. He said that the new range would be on display at Comdex in Las Vegas in November, and released soon afterwards. The second new range will be a family of controllerless facsimile modems that draw their power from the Pentium personal computer to which they are attached. Right now, fax/modems are still relatively expensive. If you go through the profile of the microprocessor work done on the fax/modem compared with the notebook or Pentium there is a lot of duplication of work, said Calvert. If you can move a lot of that from the fax/modem to the Pentium, you can make that fax/modem very inexpensive. Calvert said that a launch date and price have not been set, but he expected the controllerless modem to come in around 30% cheaper than existing models on the market. While development on existing modems is to be stopped, they will be on sale for some time. We have built up a considerable inventory of our product lines. We are taking orders up to the end of this quarter, and will ship up to the end of next, said Calvert.
