A compromise deal has finally been reached in the year long high speed analog modem standards battle at a meeting of the International Telecommunications Union in Orlando, Florida last week. The deal was reached after Lucent Technologies Inc offered a compromise, and 3Com Corp also gave ground. Earlier in the week 3Com has admitted that the uncertainty caused by the two competing standards had slowed down sales of 56Kbps modems and had been a factor in reducing the companies’ profits over the past quarter. The deal, brokered by Intel Corp, brings to an end hostilities that started in earnest last December, when Rockwell International Corp and Lucent teamed their efforts to back their K56Flex technology against modem leader US Robotics Corp’s x2. US Robotics was subsequently acquired by 3Com Corp. The two groups have been battling it out since, garnering support from the rest of the industry. 3Com won backing from IBM Corp, while Rockwell and Lucent got Cisco Systems Inc, Ascend Communications Inc, and Motorola Inc behind it. The new standard, called V.PCM (Pulse Code Modulation), will be a roughly equal hybrid of the two technologies, and Lucent, Rockwell and 3Com claim that they will deliver software upgrades to V.PCM after the ITU meeting in January which ratifies the draft standard. The final standard will be ready in September 1998. 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. Although hostilities have ceased in the 56Kbps battle they may well kick off again over the emerging broadband communications technology – Digital Subscriber Line. 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.
