Telebit

» see telebit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the modems i owned are the reason telebit stopped existing. not mine specifically, but the whole class of them: a 33.6k box on a home phone line in turkey that cost a normal amount of money and worked well enough to be boring. telebit had spent a decade selling the exact opposite of that, and when the cheap ones caught up there was nothing underneath the price.

paul baran started it in 1984. this is the same paul baran who worked out packet switching at rand in the early sixties, and by the mid-eighties he was running a company called packet technologies on bubb road in cupertino, building interactive television systems. while he was there he had an idea about how to make a fast modem, and started telebit across the street to do it. packet technologies was one of the first customers and later failed, at which point some of its people came over while the rest went off to found stratacom.

the product was the trailblazer and it did not work like any other modem. everyone else was implementing the ccitt standards, where two modems agree on a single carrier and push it as fast as the line allows. the trailblazer instead lit up as many as five hundred and twelve narrow carriers at once and then shut off whichever ones the line was ruining. a bad phone line did not drop the connection, it just cost you some tones.

telebit took its modems public in april 1990 and raised about twenty million dollars on nasdaq under the ticker tbit. for a few years there was no argument about who made the best modem in the world, only about whether you could justify the invoice.

~ the case file ~

~ how pep worked ~

the scheme was called packetized ensemble protocol, and it is what we would now call ofdm, arriving in a beige box on a desk about twenty years before it turned up in wifi and lte. each of the carriers was modulated at six baud carrying up to six bits, which topped out around eighteen thousand bits per second at a time when the common modem on the market moved twenty four hundred. more importantly, it fell apart gracefully. losing a carrier cost you ten bits per second, not the call.

the other trick was cheating. uucp and kermit both work by sending a small packet and waiting to be told it arrived, which on a slow line wastes most of the time waiting. the trailblazer answered on the line's behalf: it acknowledged the packet locally the instant the computer handed it over, so the computer kept feeding it, and the modem handled the real error correction itself using its own protocol underneath. a site making long distance uucp calls could pay off the modem in phone bills inside a year. the cost of all this was that interactive typing felt terrible, because a single character echo could take a second and a half to come back.

~ the slide ~

v.32 arrived as a standard in 1989 and rockwell went after it with chipsets rather than products, which dropped the floor out of the market. telebit's answer, the t2500, used a rockwell module inside a telebit box. by the time v.32bis showed up in 1991 there were fourteen four hundred modems selling around three hundred dollars, while telebit was still asking over a thousand for a t1600 against seven hundred for a first-tier hayes or usrobotics.

the response was to buy somebody. telebit announced the purchase of octocom systems in january 1993 for its in-progress v.34 design. manufacturing moved to chelmsford, massachusetts and sunnyvale was closed. the fastblazer 8840 landed in may 1994 at thirteen hundred and ninety-nine dollars, without v.34 support and without fax. it also dropped pep, which removed the one reason a telebit customer had ever paid a telebit price. v.34 was ratified the following month and telebit shipped support for it in january 1995, seven months after the modem went on sale.

~ what got buried with it ~

by the quarter ending march 1996 the company had used up its line of credit and burned three point two million dollars against twelve point seven million in revenue. cisco bought telebit that july for two hundred million dollars, and it is clear from what happened next that cisco wanted one thing: mica, the channelized t1 digital modem technology that lets an isp answer hundreds of calls on a rack instead of a wall of modems. management talked cisco into spinning the actual modem business back out as telebit incorporated, with a paid-up mica license. it merged into itk telekommunikation of dortmund in august 1997, and digi international bought the combined company in july 1998.

the piece worth keeping is from 1995, when an engineer in silicon valley mailed a worldblazer to an ngo in somalia and it was put straight to work carrying that country's mail over uucp. that is the machine telebit built, doing the thing it was built for, on the worst line anybody could find. telebit.com today serves a landing page for an ai marketing platform, which is what happens to a good domain when the company on it has been gone for twenty-eight years.

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