Hayes Microcomputer Products - Higher Speeds and Increased Competition

Higher Speeds and Increased Competition

Hayes was not as fast as some other manufacturers to release modems that ran faster than 2400 bit/s, which opened the door for U.S. Robotics (USR) and Telebit to meet market demand with faster products. In 1987 Hayes responded with the 9600 bit/s "Ping-Pong" protocol, which was later renamed "Express 96". The name referred to the way the modems could "ping-pong" the single high-speed link between the two ends on demand, in a fashion similar to the USR and Telebit protocols. However, the Express 96 both was late to market and lacked error correction, making it far less attractive than its competition. The design was generally unsuccessful, and for the first time Hayes lost cachet as the leader in modem design and manufacture.

Hayes's slow entry into the high-speed market led to a fracturing of the command set. In order to set up the modem to accept or reject certain types of connections, Hayes had added a number of new commands prefixed by & (the ampersand) to the Smartmodem 2400. When they moved to the Smartmodem 9600, they simply extended the set further, using the same syntax. The other companies involved all used their own syntax; USR used an incompatible set of &-prefixed commands, Microcom used \, and Telebit was based on setting a series of registers. All of these survived for some time into the early 1990s.

Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, new standard high-speed modes were introduced by the CCITT. The first of these, v.32, offered 9600 bit/s in both directions at the same time, whereas earlier high-speed protocols were high-speed in one direction only. In 1988 Hayes effectively abandoned their Express 96 protocol in favor of v.32, which along with MNP support was built into the 1199 USD Hayes V-series Smartmodem 9600. In 1990 the company introduced the Smartmodem Ultra 96 which offered both v.32 and Express 96 support, and added the new v.42bis error correction and compression system (in addition to MNP). v.32 modems remained fairly rare and expensive, although by 1990 third-party v.32 modems were available for approximately 600 USD.