Is RPI the only “software driven” modem scheme?
• No. There are similar products from other companies. This further complicates the task of the help desks of the world, for even once they have ruled out that a modem problem is due to RPI, it might be some other kind of “controllerless” modem based, for example, on the HSM chipset from AT&T (now Lucent). US Robotics (now 3Com) sells a “Winmodem” (see next question). IBM has the Mwave, whose signal processing functions (the very core of a modem) must be downloaded from the computer. • We can only expect to see more and more of this in the future. As a maker of such items commented in the comp.dcom.modems newsgroup, “There’s certainly a market for platform-independent modems, but you can’t expect manufacturers to ignore the market opportunity for Windows-only modems, especially when they can have a cost and performance advantage.” Of course you can’t. But what about end users who don’t understand any of this? Most of them do not make informed choices when buying modems. And increasingl
