The lowdown on... V.92

It's the new modem standard that hasn't quite arrived.  Involving more than just an increase in data throughput, V.92 has a number of useful new features - even if ISPs are being slow on providing V92 support.  Time for a lowdown...

Official standard

In July 2000, ITU (the International Telecommunication Union, the international standardization committee) adopted the new V.92 modem standard.

But while the standard is over a year old, any talk of V.92 should be accompanied by a 'health warning'. Take up has not yet been established - ISPs have been slow to show any sign of upgrading their hardware to support V.92 connections. And given that ISP support must be present for the consumer to get the most out of V.92, demand will not naturally build from end-users. It's a chicken and egg situation...

Having got that out of the way, what new features could you enjoy if your ISP upgraded its vast banks of modems?

V.92 What is it good for?

Traditionally, modem standards marked increases in speeds. New modem releases were known by the modem standards they conformed to - a 'V.34 modem', for example, would conform to the V.34 standard and support the features and throughput it specified.

What makes V.92 interesting is the extra features it supports - 'quick connect', 'call waiting', and increased compression for handling data more efficiently. Then there is the question of speed, or data throughput, to be more precise....

New features

First of all there is the promise of quicker connections. With the modem automatically storing all dial-in parameters, it provides a considerably quicker dial-in procedure for all subsequent connections. In V.92 terms, this is called 'quick connect'. The idea is that with one click you can be online.

Second, with 'modem call waiting' you can still be reached by telephone when you are using the line for Internet access. With V.92 you can simply answer the phone and the modem will suspend the Internet connection until the line becomes free again. Which is nice.

Third, V.92 also incorporates V.44 data compression. While this is strictly another standard, independent of V.92, it does represent another benefit. After all, processing data more efficiently almost equates to a speed increase - the same amount of work is done in a shorter time. V.44, it is estimated, gives an improvement in compression of more than 25% over V.42bis and could almost double the effective speed of normal Web browsing.

Finally, what about speed? In terms of transmitting data, while the headline figure for V.92 matches that of V.90 - i.e. 56K - the new standard does represent a further development. Courtesy of the 'PCM Upstream' feature, data rates for uploading have increased from 33.6Kbit/sec to 48Kbit/sec. Something to consider if you find yourself constantly uploading files - pictures from your new digital camera up to the manufacturer's image gallery, perhaps.

This last point needs a bit of expanding and a quick review of the advancements made by V.90... Why, for example, is 48K considered an improvement for a supposedly 56K modem?

A bit of history

Whereas modem standards traditionally assumed analogue connections to the phone lines at each end of the session, V.90 represented a new step. With the conversion of data signals from analogue to digital and back again - 'modem' does stand for Modulator-Demodulator, after all - communications were constrained by the limitations of the public switched telephone network and the theoretical maximum transmission rate of 35Kbits/sec. V.90, however, made the assumption that one end of the modem session (that of the service provider) would have a fully digital connection and be able to sustain a higher throughput.

In very general terms, the envelope was now being pushed as to how much could be transmitted across our telephone lines. It meant V.90 could be advertised with a headline figure of 56K, which is true, but it refers to the 'downstream' only - pushing data 'upstream' would continue at 33.6Kbit/sec.

Note also that the digitally-encoded downstream data is transferred asymmetrically, which means your 'upstream transmissions' can continue to be sent. Follow this link for more details on the physics of pulse coded modulation and how V.90 weaves its 'magic'.

Remember that at the time - and the competing issues around the implementation of V.90 were settled back in February 1998 - V.90 technology was seen as ideal because the Internet was viewed as a distribution medium that would predominantly involve the downloading of large items of data. The increasing use of personal Web pages with rich media content - including video and audio files - has changed this view, somewhat.

Compatibility

A few questions inevitably arise for a new modem standard.

For example, can the "V.92-ready " modems you are now seeing on shop shelves also be used for 'conventional' connections to ISPs not supporting V92? Yes, there should be no restrictions. When modems negotiate to establish a connection they will resolve to the highest common denominator available - V.90, perhaps, or V.34.

Can your existing modems be upgraded to the V.92 standard? Almost certainly not, unfortunately, because some of the features in the standard require hardware support. Modems would have to be explicitly built for the V.92 standard to be able to support any such upgrade. (For example, Creative recently released its Modem Blaster USB as 'V.92-ready' but it was V.90 out of the box and required updates from the Creative site for V.92.)

Can I go online, now, with V.92? Unfortunately, as already mentioned, you will be very lucky to find any ISP offering V.92 at the present time. The general message seems to be 'not yet'...

Links

International Telecommunication Union
You can read the ITU V.92 Recommendation here.

Major modem manufacturers have plenty to say about V92:
Hayes
US Robotics
ELSA Microlink
Zoom

You can also read more at the appropriate domain www.v92.com, which is owned by Conexant Systems from the semiconductor industry. (www.v90.com also has a lot of interesting data to help put things in context.)

March 2002

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