14400 bps - up, up and away.....

Hi there ! You still with me ? Amazing ! Even more amazing is the fact that you are probably still using a 2400 bps modem.

Picture this:

You just logged into your favourite online host (possibly a BBS, Compuserve or your company's mainframe) from across the country. There is this massive file you just HAVE to download. The remote host graciously informs you how long it is going to take - just over an hour ! Hmm, let me see - that is 60 minutes multiplied by 60 seconds divided by 2 (being the pulse rate from Bangalore to Delhi). That is 1800 smackeroos ! Wow! Who is going to pay for this ? Your company ? Then that's OK. What ? You mean YOU are paying for this? Are you out of your mind ????? Stop mumbling about "2400 bits per second is the fastest one can go here". That was in January this year (when you read my first column in PC Quest). Times have changed - high speed modems have arrived.

Improvements all around

1993 is probably going to be the year when low speed modems finally get to be consigned to the museum here in India. Earlier this year, modem manufacturers introduced reliable 14400 bps modems in this country. I myself was a bit skeptical - how were these speed demons going to perform on our "miserable" phone lines ? Actually, they perform quite well - amazingly well, as a matter of fact. You see, not only have new modems brought in new and improved technology that is better equipped to handle our lines, the Indian telephone system itself has seen quite a number of improvements. For example, most telephone exchanges in the metros (and Bangalore, the metro-that-the-powers-refuse-to-call-a-metro) have gone electronic. The clicking, popping, crackling crossbar exchanges that were once the bane of Indian datacomm are historical relics in many of these cities. Also, the P&T seems to have woken up to the fact that phone lines have a finite life, and need to be replaced at least once per century. Finally, with more exchanges in the circuit, the infamous "last mile" has been reduced considerably, thereby reducing the pickup of noise along the way. Quality of long-distance lines has improved noticably. Today a call from Bangalore to Delhi is normally clearer that a call to an office across town.

Welcome to the Fast Lane!

So what's the current definition of high speed according to Atul Chitnis ? The simple answer is - anything faster than 9600 bps. This effectively means 14400 bps or better. With V.42bis compression, that can be almost 57600 bps or 5.76 kiloBYTES a second ! One nice thing about high speed modems faster that 9600 bps is that many (if not all of them) are compatible with each other. When 9600 bps modems first arrived here, there were a lot of problems, with different makes of modems refusing to talk to each other. No such problem at 14400 bps - ALL of them use the V.32bis standard for transmission, ALL of them have V.42 error correction and ALL of them use V.42bis compression. There are NO non-error correcting 14.4K modems. Three cheers for standards ! Communicating at 14400 bps is a nice feeling. Six times faster than a 2400 bps connection, things seem to fly. The one hour transfer described at the beginning of this column drops down to 10 minutes, or about 300 bucks STD cost. Since we are talking V.42bis compression here, things could be faster than this, and even ZIP files (a nightmare to transfer using MNP5 when the protocol tries to compress something Phil Katz's PKZIP 2.04G couldn't compress any further) trundle along at a respectable rate.

Here is the good news...

Modems in India tend to be expensive, but luckily it has always been a "you get what you pay for" situation - the more expensive modems tend to perform much better than the cheapos. Until recently, a decent 2400 bps modem cost around Rs.20,000, with a few low-cost guys robbing you for around 15K. Today, a decent 14400 bps modem will cost you about 34K (and dropping). That's six times the speed at about 1.5 times the price ! Not a bad deal, what say ? If you consider the savings in transmission time, you don't have to be Shakuntala Devi to realise that you make up the cost of the modem in a very short time.

Resistance to change

Sad, but true. Many large corporates still follow the beaten path of being "penny wise, pound foolish". Recently, a HUGE corporate I know went and bought a stack of 2400 bps MNP modems, thinking that they saved a lot of money in the bargain. Oh really ? Look at these figures: 20 modems x Rs.20,000 = Rs.400,000 Assuming 100 KB data transmission per day per modem (typical in corporate setups), then at 2400 bps it is 20 x (100 x 1024 /240) = 8533 seconds a day, or about Rs.4266 per day at 2 second pulse rates. (2400 bps is 240 BYTES per second) If they would have bought 14400 bps modems instead, it would have been 20 modems x Rs.34,000 = Rs. 6,80,000 and 20 x (100 x 1024 /1440) = 1422 seconds a day, or about Rs.711 per day at 2 second pulse rates. Now multiply transmission costs over a year of 200 working days, and you get Rs. 8,53,200 when using 2400 bps modems and Rs. 1,42,200 when using 14400 bps modems. So the sum total for the "2400 bps wallas" is 12.5 lakhs in the first year, while the "14400 bps wallas" pay only about 8.22 lakhs. Also consider that the 2400 bps modems may seem "state-of-the-art" to your finance department, but a year down the line, they will feel like 8088, 4.77 MHz single-drive CGA PCs do today. The 14400 bps modems, though, will continue to hold their own over a couple of years. 19200-to-24000 bps modems are already available in the USA, 28800 bps will be here before mid-'94, so that 14400 will very soon be entry level. Consider, too, that most of the new 14.4K modems also incorporate fax capabilities, some at 14.4K - much faster than current stand-alone fax machines, and the savings add up, especially when a good fax machine alone costs almost 50% more than a 14.4K fax modem.

The downside

"OK, Mr.A. So 14.4K modems are faster, but who guarantees that they will work consistantly at that speed ?" Not me. Not today. I CAN virtually guarantee sustained performance between metros and within the city, but if your trunk line goes through a couple of lousy crossbar exchanges, then things are likely to slow down. To maybe 12,000 bps, 9600 bps or even 4800 bps. But even in a worst-case scenario, that's twice as fast as the 2400 bps relic you are planning to purchase ! And many 14.4K modems have a feature thats allows the modem to fall back when the line goes bad, and fall forward again when conditions improve. I CAN guarantee that with improvement in line conditions (as it is happening almost daily), it will be more than likely that you will be able to transfer at maximum speed. One factor that MUST be considered, though, is handshake time. High speed modems tend to take a much longer time to establish a connection initially, typically from 5 to 15 seconds as opposed to 1-5 seconds for 2400 bps modems. So all that high speed may not really pay off if you are only transferring a kilobyte or two of data per day, since the total of handshaking and actual transfer in a 14.4K modem may be longer than the handshake and transfer of a 2400 bps modem. But the, any 14.4K modem can be forced down to 2400 bps if needed, and will perform better than any 2400-only modem can.

Cheapos and Foreign returns...

"Phoren ish besht !" is the accepted credo in most circles. Sez who ? Pick up that incredibly cheap modem in the USA, and you'll soon understand why it was so cheap. Cheap performance, cheap components and no after-sales support all add up to a disaster. Also remember that 99% of cheap American modems are made in Taiwan or Korea, so the "Made in the USA" tag is no guarantee of performance. And don't forget the P&T watch dogs who are just waiting to hear that 14.4K carrier tone on your line before slamming you for using a non-TEC cleared modem. Foreign modems are NOT cleared by the P&T, so this is not a game of roulette you should play. If I am beginning to sound like a salesman for a modem company, forgive me, but I am stating facts that I gathered from experience. So before you ask your friend/relative/associate/well-wisher in the USA to pick up a modem for you, think twice. You are likely to end up paying twice as much as it would cost you here. Remember - there is nothing like a free lunch.

Fast Modems need Fast Machines

A critical issue in high speed modem usage is the speed of your machine. You CANNOT use a 14.4K modem on a XT with an 8250B UART, a 20MB ST225 hard disk and a 3-wire serial cable. Period. An 80286 or better machine IS required, and preferably a 16550AFN UART (serial communications) chip. And the serial cable must have all nine critical connections wired up to allow hardware flow control. Anything less, and you are asking for trouble.

Which modem is the best ?

On an average, I am asked this question about 50 times a day, via e-mail, snail mail and telephone calls. I have used high speed modems made by a number of manufacturers, but to date haven't really sat down to do a complete evaluation. I did ask some manufacturers for evaluation pieces, but all of them seemed to think that modem evaluation is a 30 minute job. No way. Anyway, as soon as I have done a fair and comprehensive evaluation of some of the 14.4K modems available in India, PKR and I will sit down and have a "modem special" that tells you of our findings (provided you are interested - write to The Editor, PCQ, and let him know). Until then, I can only say "no comment".

Saving money

One of the objectives of my articles is to help you save money. If you are a reasonably heavy Compuserve user, then a high speed modem is likely to help you save. The trick is - call the Compuserve node at Hong Kong (00852-3041332). This is a 9600 bps node with V.42 error correction (as in all carrier networks, it does not support compression, so make sure you disable it with AT%C0 or AT&E14 before calling). If you have a fairly long Compuserve session ahead of you, calling Hong Kong is mucho cheaper than using INET, which charges you Rs.200/64K. The call to Hong Kong is tariffed at 1.2 seconds per pulse (at least something good about being a SAARC country), and you will get an effective throughput of about 750 chars per second as opposed to about 170 chars per second via INET. A 1 MB file transferred from Compuserve will cost you about Rs.1200 via Hong Kong, and about Rs.3200 if transferred via INET. It will also take a lot less time via Hong Kong.

Bombay modem users, please note:

The Bombay MTNL people have introduced an innovative(?) way of telling you that you have crossed the 5 minute limit for a local call - it gives you a loud BEEP. Unfortunately, the decision makers up there don't seem to use modems. A beep like that immediately breaks any modem connection. A gigantic BOOOO! is called for, and is herewith given. Until the people at MTNL come to their senses, you can avoid the cutoff by setting your modem's S10 register to a value of 25 or higher. The default value of 14 stands for 1.4 seconds, which is too short to handle the MTNL folly. Setting it to a higher value will keep the connection alive inspite of the beep. You may have to experiment a bit to get the right value. By the way, from the appearance of things, the telecom people at Bangalore DO use modems - no beeps here. Makes you want to move, doesn't it ?

Gimme a break

I have said it before - I'll say it again. Writing for PC Quest is one thing - answering personal letters and queries via e-mail and phone calls is another. PLEASE do not flood me with letters and calls asking me questions. I am being bombarded with queries ranging from modems to networks, from DOS to games and from programming issues to requests for pirated software ! I do not wish to sound like a mercenary, but my company does professional consulting - if you are willing to pay for the information that we provide, by all means call. If not, please write to me c/o The Editor, PC Quest, New Delhi. Or, even better, make sure you have a PC Quest subscription - most of your questions are likely to be answered in future columns. At Rs.149 a year for a subscription, that's a steal. As far as bouquets and brickbats are concerned - I am open to any suggestions or criticisms. Feel free to fire away. Writing to The Editor, PCQ will give you the added advantage of having PKR on your side - he'll soon set me right. This time, I'll say bye in the Bombay MTNL way.... BEEEEEEP NO CARRIER