56k Modems?
by Jack Lewtschuk
from Monterey Bay Users Group-PC
From the October 1997 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter
April 18, 1997 A California attorney has filed class-action lawsuits against all of the major modem manufacturers, accusing them of falsely advertising their so-called 56-kilobits-per-second modems. Donald Driscoll has filed two suits in California, one against U.S. Robotics, the other against companies in the K56flex consortium, which include Rockwell, Lucent, Motorola, and others. Driscoll contends that modem manufacturers are over-hyping what this new generation of technology can do, and he's asking the courts to force the companies to change how they market their 56-kbps offerings. "Obviously the product is a modem, you use it to transmit data; there's nothing unlawful about the product," said Driscoll. "We just want to make sure that the advertising is consistent with the product. When they say 56K or K56, I want them to make sure that there's an asterisk that explains the problems."
So far, because of line noise and other issues, 56-kbps modems rarely provide users with data transfer rates much higher than 50 kbps. They're limited to rates of 33.6 kbps on the upstream side of the call, in any case. This is not a new role for Driscoll. Another of his suits forced computer monitor makers to refer to the size of their products in terms of the actual viewable area of the CRT. Driscoll claimed that change cleared up confusion among consumers without hurting monitor manufacturers, and he sees no reason why the same can't be true with 56-kbps modems. Now it will be up to the courts to decide whether 56-kbps modem manufacturers are in fact misleading consumers.
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