Product: Gazel 128 USB
Company: Bewan
Website: http://www.bewan.com/
Estimated Street Price: $110.00 ; £79.00
Review By: Julien JAY

Design

The Gazel 128 modem is a nice and well designed unit with a round green transparent shell that features two DEL indicating the status of the modem and the way data are received or sent. Obviously due to its incredible small size you can bring it where you want! Bewan has managed to miniaturize it due to the fact it's a passive modem. Indeed with today powerful computers the modem only takes on board the strict minimum of required electronic: the rest is totally managed by the drivers. If passive modems are small and affordable they obviously use more CPU resources than an ISDN active modem; however today's PCs are more powerful than needed (who needs to use a 1.2 GHz CPU to type letters? so it's frankly not a drawback.)

Bewan Gazel 128 USB (click to enlarge)

Features

As we said, with this kind of modem the most important thing is the drivers’ quality. On this point we are really not disappointed since Bewan provides what we can call the finest ISDN drivers we’ve ever seen. First of all with an ISDN modem like the Bewan Gazel 128 USB you’ll get an internet connection up to 4 times faster than with a conventional modem. As the modem supports two B channels you can establish one 128kbps Internet connection, one 64kbps connection keeping one line free for voice calls (no matter which phone number is assigned to the line). You can also establish two 64Kbps connections simultaneously that is to say you can connect to two different ISP at the same time. Note that this also works for sending or receiving faxes while you’re connected to the net.

Performances

What to say about the performances of the modem except that it uses few CPU resources while in use and that we found it very reliable since we didn’t encounter any errors, unexpected disconnections or things like that. The only drawback we can address to Bewan is the high USB bandwidth consumption (up to 11%) but that’s not their fault since every USB modems use a large USB bandwidth. Obviously connections are always established to the constant 64Kbps speed: I mean that unlike with a 56k modem once you’re connected on the net the transmission speed doesn’t vary due to the line perturbations, etc… If your internet connection is stable and fast it still depends on the servers’ speed you’re contacting: if the server you’re trying to reach is slow and has got a slow Ping it’ll remain slow with ISDN.