Xircom's CreditCard Makes The Connection By Joel Conover   What could you possibly add to a 28.8 modem/Ethernet combo PC Card? Xircom's latest PC Card product, the CreditCard Ethernet+Modem 33.6, offers improved speeds using V.34+ technology and a handy connector, dubbed the MiniDock. Fast Connections Equal More Time If your hotel experiences are anything like mine, the advent of a 33.6-Kbps modem excites you about as much as watching grass grow. But there is more to the V.34+ standard than higher top speeds. V.34+, which makes 33.6 Kbps possible, improves existing negotiation techniques to give you about 4,000 bytes per second more than the standard V.34 connection. This difference translates into more 24.6-Kbps or 28.8-Kbps connections and less waiting around. Another nice feature of the V.34+ standard is that many vendors are releasing flash code to upgrad e their modems. You may get to take advantage of some of this improved speed without waiting for your network center to buy new modems. Xircom has come up with a novel way to get connected. Its MiniDock is about the length of a PC Card and it attaches to the end of the CreditCard Ethernet+Modem 33.6. An RJ-45 port for Ethernet and an RJ-11 port for your phone line both are on the upper end. The entire dock is housed in a hard plastic case and has four LEDs that indicate network and modem activity and connection status. Rather than relying on a flimsy connector cable, the MiniDock lets you plug a standard phone line directly into the card. And unlike an X Jack, you don't have to worry about breaking the MiniDock--it's built to last. However, if you're a die-hard cable fan, Xircom also offers traditional cables to plug into the CreditCard+Ethernet 33.6. For the best of both worlds, keep the MiniDock at your desk and the cab les in your notebook bag for when you're on the road. We took the CreditCard+Ethernet 33.6 into the lab to determine how well it performs. Using a real phone line between our University of Wisconsin at Madison lab and my home office, we tested the card's ability to connect at 33.6 Kbps. The remote test site used a U.S. Robotics Courier V.Everything modem with V.34+ support. Installing the CreditCard+Ethernet 33.6 under Windows95 was a plug-and-play experience. The card was identified properly and installed using the provided driver disk. The card supports hot-docking when using a Card Services driver, such as the one provided with Microsoft Windows95. After configuring a dial-up networking connection using Windows95 dial-up networking, we attempted to connect the modem at 33.6 Kbps. The modem initially is configured not to report its connection speed, making it difficult to tell how fast we were really communicating. The Xircom CreditCard Ethernet+Modem 33.6 is capable of fax communications at spee ds of up to 14,400 bytes per second, and it comes with Symantec Corp.'s WinFax Lite 4.0 and WinComm Lite 1.1. Although we wouldn't recommend running out to upgrade your PC Cards just for the added 33.6 feature, we do recommend picking a 33.6-compliant card for future cards. The additional throughput and reliability can't hurt, and you can expect that many vendors will discontinue their 28.8 products in favor of the 33.6 variety. Xircom's CreditCard Ethernet+Modem 33.6 gives you all the V.34+ functionality, plus the durable MiniDock, and will be shipping by press time. Joel Conover can be reached at jconover@nwc.com.

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