Editing Hayes Microcomputer Products (section)

==Higher speeds and increased competition==
Hayes was not as fast as some other manufacturers to release modems that ran faster than 2400&nbsp;bit/s, which opened the door for [[USRobotics]] (USR) and [[Telebit]] to meet market demand with faster products. Telebit was the fastest, running up to ~18,500&nbsp;bit/s and maintaining higher speeds on noisy lines where other models would fall-back to lower speeds. They were also expensive and found mostly in professional settings, notably for [[Unix]]-running [[minicomputer]]s for [[UUCP]] use where their [[protocol spoofing]] offered further speed improvements. USR's designs were simpler than Telebits and ran at "only" 9,600&nbsp;bit/s, but carved out a strong niche by offering deep discounts to [[sysop]]s.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.umich.edu/~archive/mac/misc/documentation/telecomminfo.txt |title=What You Need To Know About Modems |first=Kenneth |last=Kirksey |date=25 December 1991 |quote=The immense popularity of the HST modems was partly due to the generous discount program U.S. Robotics offered to the BBS Sysops (SYStem OPerators).}}</ref>

In 1987 Hayes responded with the Hayes Express 96 protocol, a 9600&nbsp;bit/s protocol.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.umich.edu/~archive/mac/misc/documentation/telecomminfo.txt |title=What You Need To Know About Modems |first=Kenneth |last=Kirksey |date=25 December 1991 |page=Hayes Express 96}}</ref> It was sometimes referred to as the "Ping-Pong" protocol due 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. The key improvement is that the channel could be switched very rapidly, without a renegotiation procedure. However, 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' 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 {{mono|&}} (the ampersand) to the Smartmodem 2400. Other companies offering 2400&nbsp;bit/s generally followed the same syntax. When Hayes moved to the Smartmodem 9600, they extended the set further, using the same syntax. However, by this time the other companies involved had introduced their own syntax; USR used an incompatible set of {{mono|&}}-prefixed commands, [[Microcom]] used {{mono|\}}, 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, [[ITU-T V.32|V.32]], offered 9600&nbsp;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 [[Microcom Networking Protocol|MNP]] support was built into the US$1199 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 [[ITU-T V.42bis|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 US$600.