This article is intended for personal viewing only and may not be re-distributed in any form. Please e-mail link requests. There is no doubt there was a sigh of relief when a consensus was reached in an Orlando, Fla., conference room last month. It was a gathering of the top modem makers, who reached a long-awaited agreement on how to make their latest modems compatible with each other.
Modems are the devices that let computers talk to each other over telephone lines.
Modem speed is of vital importance to anyone who surfs the World Wide Web because, as frequent users know, most of the time is spent waiting for pages and graphics to be delivered to your computer. But the new 56K modems were met with a rash of criticism for two reasons. One, they didn't deliver as promised. The fastest these modems really delivered information was 53,000 Kbps, the companies acknowledge in fine print. And in reality, many people have never been able to get the modems to operate at that speed because of the quality of their telephone lines.