The the V.fast Rapporteur Group is attempting to put a positive gloss on the problems in finalising the standard. It says that the issues that had stalled completion have now been resolved, and that it expects to have the final draft standard completed by next January, with final edits by March. This would pave the way for approval and ratification at the group’s June 1994 meeting. Progress on the International Telecommunications Union-Telecommunications Standards V.fast modem standard appeared to be stalled and the draft will not be completed in time for tabling at the Telecommunications Union’s Geneva meeting this month. Meantime, some prescient modem manufacturers, including Atlanta-based Hayes Microcomputer Products Inc, have tired of waiting for ratification and turned instead to an interim industry standard called V.Fast Class or VFC, announced just prior to the Boston meeting. Using El Segundo, California company Rockwell International Corp’s VFC data pump technology, Hayes plans to provide high-speed data and fax modems that support VFC modulation for 28.8Kbps data transmission to the global market. Hayes says it had hoped it could wait for the V.fast standards, but the market is not waiting. According to president Dennis Hayes, the industry needs an interim de facto standard and its decision to work with Rockwell provides that standard because Rockwell serves approximately 70% of the market. Hayes will give no release date but will definitely ship at some point. Rockwell was more candid, saying it expected some manufacturers to ship VFC products in the next 30 to 60 days in line with its own production schedule. Rockwell claims its VFC range, including data pumps and integrated modems with associated controller firmware, will support V.32/V.32bis for data and V.17 for facsimile. It also says that its V.Fast-compliant products will maintain inter-working compatibility with its VFC family. Manufacturers committing to VFC include ELSA GmbH, Germany, SAT SA, France, Digicom SpA of Italy and Wimbledon-based Dataflex Design Ltd among others, says Rockwell. As to V.fast, no one is publicly dropping their support. Rockwell says its VFC products will not dilute V.fast, as they incorporate V.fast technology like line probing and multi-dimensional trellis coding.
Truly open standard
Indeed Hayes and Rockwell go so far as to suggest that VFC will ease the path of V.fast, acting as a testbed for practical experiments on things such as transmission speeds over cellular radio. But will anyone want V.fast when it arrives? Yes, says Rockwell, because it will be a truly open standard. Users will want to connect to every vendor’s modem and 70% interoperability is still not 100%, it says, adding that the financial justification for buying VFC products now, then migrating to V.fast was strong, given immediate demands for faster transmission and Rockwell’s aggressive pricing policy. It also feels V.fast would not wither because a number of manufacturers not involved in VFC would have a strong commercial interest in maintaining it. In addition, at the Boston meeting, officials were at pains to emphasise that the revised deadlines were concrete, so the chance of vendors simply renaming VFC V.fast and submitting it for ratification is remote.
