News.com meldt dat 3Com zijn slecht lopende dialup modem divisie af gaat stoten. Het nieuwe bedrijf gaat US Robotics heten, dezelfde naam die het bedrijf had toen het 3 jaar geleden door 3Com werd gekocht:
3Com, a once-leading purveyor of data-networking equipment, tomorrow will announce that the dial-up modem business it's spinning off will emerge with the same name it had when 3Com bought the company in 1997, an acquisition that eventually proved disastrous.
[...] Although the acquisition proved to be what some called 3Com's undoing, the U.S. Robotics brand is well-known, and 3Com pointed to industry forecasts showing that growth in dial-up modems will continue at a reasonable rate, despite the rapid rollout of high-speed cable and DSL Internet access.
3Com was caught with bloated modem inventories and modem speeds that started to top out, while Cisco Systems built up its business of selling routers to speed bits of data across corporate networks and the Internet.
Anders heet het dan toch geen modem (Modulator Demodulator)
