For Immediate Release Contact:Karen Novak, (708) 982-5244 Lauri Lentz, (708) 982-5230 NEW V.34 HIGH-SPEED MODEM STANDARD MOVES INTO THE FAST LANE FOR ADOPTION SKOKIE, Ill., -- November 15, 1993 -- V.34, the forthcoming standard for 28.8 Kbps dial-up modem transmission, moved closer to adoption at a recent ITU-T (formerly CCITT) meeting in Dublin, Ireland. After almost three years of intense effort, all of the technical issues relating to the data phase of the V.34 standard have been resolved, assuring fully interoperable analog communications at 28.8 Kbps. Field testing of the new high-speed data transmission standard will begin in early 1994, using prototype modems that conform to the draft standard. Formal adoption of V.34 is expected in June 1994 by Study Group 14 of the ITU-T, which is responsible for international modem standards. Prior to that meeting, a "stable technical draft" of V.34 is scheduled for approval at a meeting of the V.34 rapporteur's group in Orlando, Fla. December 13 and 14. "We're not at the point where you could build the final modem from what we've written, but we are pretty close," says Ken Jones, chief scientist at Telebit and a member of the V.34 rapporteur's group. "We'll finish up the technical details in December, but the technical choices are pretty much done. Right now it's down to a matter of some decisions that in some cases get down to heads or tails kinds of choices." V.34 Modems in February? Dick Brandt, Chairman, Working Party 1 of Study Group 14, says he expects V.34-compliant modems to appear in the market soon after the completed draft standard is submitted to the ITU-T in February. At the recent Dublin meetings, the rapporteur's group got international support for much of its work and straightened out most of the details on the training sequence or "handshake" that allows two V.34 modems to communicate. The rapporteur's group agreed on a 64-state trellis coding that increases V.34 modems' immunity to line noise. "The more powerful coding increases noise immunity by an additional db and it works under almost any line condition," explains Dale Walsh, U.S. Robotics vice president of advanced development and a member of the committee developing the standard once simply called V.fast. Adds fellow committee member Dave Forney, vice president, technical staff, of Motorola, "On any given connection, V.34 will always work better than V.32 or V.32 bis because it takes advantage of whatever the line conditions are. It will use every bit of available bandwidth. In addition to higher data rate, it will also give users more robustness and flexibility." V.Last? Don't Bet on It At some of the earliest V.34 committee meetings, the standard -- then known as V.fast -- was also jokingly referred to as "V.last" by some members, since it stretched the limits of dial-up telephone lines. But those same committee members are already thinking about a new, faster standard, tentatively called V.34 bis. There was talk at the Dublin meeting about tweaking V.34 to make it a little faster, admits Telebit's Jones. "I think we could the push data rate a little if we really want to spend some time on that, but I can't see us getting much beyond 32 Kbps on dial-up lines." A Standard by Any Other Name Isn't a Standard Walsh also notes that users should not confuse the many non-standard high-speed modems, like the 19.2 Kbps V.32 terbo or 28.8 Kbps V.Fast Class modems, with V.34. These technologies may be useful, but will most likely not communicate with standard ITU-T V.34 modems without some sort of upgrade. These technologies arose from the delays associated with the V.34 standard, as an effort to provide data transmission at higher speeds. # # # # # Additional contacts: Dick Brandt, Chairman, Working Party 1 of Study Group 14, (908) 735-6171 Bill Heimbach, Motorola Codex, (617) 821-7295 Ken Jones, Telebit, (508) 441-2181 Fred Lucas, General Datacomm, (203) 574-1118 Michael McLaughlin, Cornel, +3531 523 522 (Ireland) Haig Sarkissian, AT&T Microelectronics, (908) 771-4250 Richard Williams, British Telecom, +44 473 646 020 (United Kingdom) /107 All products and technologies mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective manufacturers.