In the face of opposition from over 60 manufacturers, the 18 companies hoping to have the V.32terbo modem standard adopted by the Consulative Committee on International Telephony and Telegraphy, have abandoned their efforts. Matters came to a head last week with a series of joint press conferences by more than 60 modem manufacturers, which they say represent more than 75% of worldwide production, stating their opposition to the plan. Among the names are Cray Communications Ltd, General Datacomm Industries Inc, Hayes Microcomputer Products, Microcom Inc, Mot-rola Codex, Netcomm, Racal Datacom, Rockwell International Corp, Telenetics, and the Tricom Group. Indeed, so fierce has been the opposition that the plan to submit the technology to the CCITT seems to have been dropped almost overnight, amid denials that this had ever been the intention anyway: AT&T Paradyne now claims that it was only ever intending to push the technology as a de facto standard, while Bob Jones, managing director of Sonix Communications, maintains that it was More a discussion point than anything else. However, just two weeks ago both companies put their names to a press release that said The companies will pursue an effort before the appropriate standards bodies to formalise the proposed modulation scheme. Both AT&T Paradyne and Sonix intend to continue with their work on V.32terbo, but now see it as an open, unofficial standard. They still, maintain, however, that there are no inherent problems with the technology. The opposition to V.32terbo has been centred on two fronts: that it stretches the capabilities of V.32 too far, unreasonably raising users’ expectations of the speeds that they will achieve, and that an interim standard is not needed anyway, because V.fast is just around the corner. Indeed, the group predicts that full definition of V.fast will take place before the end of the year, with products following shortly afterwards. On the technical side, the dispute centres around V.32terbo’s inability to adapt its bandwidth to channel impairments: according to its critics, this means that it cannot optimise the throughput that the telephone network can support, resulting in frequent fallback to lower speeds. V.32terbo’s advocates, by contrast, believe that speeds of 19.2Kbps are realistically achievable and that fallback is not a major problem. This group also includes AT&T EasyLink, Nokia Telecommunications, National Semiconductor Corp, and Dataflex Design Ltd. James Dow, president and chief executive Officer of Microcom Inc, which has come out against V.32terbo, also feels that it could divert research and development resources away from V.fast, lengthening the timescale for its development. He feels that the joint statement was needed as It was important to let people know of all the companies against V.32terbo… otherwise AT&T’s marketing machine might persuade them otherwise. One company that seems to be out on its own is US Robotics Inc: while it has issued a statement stat-ing opposition to V.32terbo, its efforts are being concentrated on its own high speed standard, called HSTbis, which it is to launch in April. Presumably for this reason, the company is not one of those that is named amongst the group of 60. US Robotics says, however, that it will produce V.fast-conformant products once the standard is fully-defined.
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