--- Brad du Plessis <bradd@cat.co.za> wrote: > > On the bright side,
_real_ modems seem to be making a comeback. I
> saw
> > a Zoom USB external for about $50 in Best Buy the other day.
> 
> I'm not so sure, I've been looking for USB modems for our system and
> there's 
> not much available that still uses a 'hardware' chipset. How long
> before 
> there's no such thing as a real modem????
> 
> With the market driven by cost, and with most hardware companies
> targeting 
> their development for 'that other operating system', surely winmodems
> have to 
> be supported sooner rather than later.
> 

I was doing some looking out of curiosity: a lot of these devices do
not seem to have any open specification and this will be the major
hurdle in porting drivers to NetBSD in my opinion (some are open, and
of course you can look at the drivers for linux, although without a
publically accessible code reporistory this is inconvenient). Some
Winmodems require implementing digital signal processing in software
and while I would love to have the winmodem I bought supported, this
really sounds like a pain.

On cost: ICs are dirt cheap. A hardware modem is basically implemented
as 1 or 2 chips + required analog electronics (which a winmodem MUST
also have!) so I don't see why a winmodem should cost < $20 and a
hardware modem is > $40. (Aren't NICs under $20 now???) Sounds like
marketing, not real costs.

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