Brent Townshend, the man who claims to have dreamed up the idea for 56K bit/sec modems, says he wants to see the technology take off and he wants to make money from it. The 37-year-old president of Townshend Computer Tools in Menlo Park, Calif., has already taken one big step toward that goal by licensing his technology to 3Com Corp.
While we couldn't get the camera-shy inventor to sit for a photograph, he did talk with Network World Senior Writer Tim Greene last week about the emerging 56K bit/sec modem market and his role in it.
On where the 56K bit/sec modem idea came from:
We started with a very specific problem - how do we get higher speed data from the digital server to many analog links - and started working on it from that point of view.
We worked out the calculations for what kind of theoretical data rate you can get in that situation, which is quite high, and then developed a technique for doing that. Then we realized that this is not a solution for this specific engineering problem, this is a thing of general utility.
On what his patent application covers:
I've never seen any other example of a way to go higher than 33.6K bit/sec without using this technology.
On his relationship with 3Com:
3Com is taking the front on this. I find it much more interesting working on new stuff all the time, as opposed to trying to take an idea and spend 10 years getting it into the market.
On the $1.25 he wants per modem:
We're talking about the basic idea of how to do this - $1.25 per modem is not unreasonable at all for that.
On 56K bit/sec modem standards:
I'm extremely pro-standards. I've already got modems that don't talk to each other.
On his current project:
The primary thing we're working on right now is language systems. You can telephone into one of our servers and it asks you questions and you talk to it for 10 minutes. It assesses your ability to speak English using speech recognition technology. @
http://inventors.about.com
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