than a leader. By the mid-1990s their modems were also based on the Rockwell chipset and had little to distinguish themselves from other vendors. Oddly it was the Rockwell chip set that also re-standardized the various command sets back on the original high-speed ones introduced by Hayes. As the Rockwell-based systems became more and more common, other companies, like AT&T, introduced new versions of their modem chip sets with identical commands. Rockwell had taken their commands from the V-series Smartmodems, so by the mid-90s the market was once again based largely on a "real" Hayes command set. Decline and fall Hayes realized that changes in the telephone networks would eventually render the modem, in its current form, obsolete. As early as 1985 he started efforts to produce consumer-ready ISDN "modems", betting the company on ISDN becoming a widespread standard—which was widely believed at the time. By the early 1990s, this was a major focus of the company. However, unlike Europe or Japan, ISDN simply never happened in the US consumer market. The whole model was based on end-to-end digital communications, and was thus limited to the speed of the long-distance carrier lines, either 56 or 64 kbit/s. The Bell companies were interested in deploying ISDN, but doing so required customer-end installations to make their conventional telephones work, which made the system unattractive for wide-scale deployment. Additionally, the rise of the Internet in the mid-1990s made point-to-point communications far less interesting. After dialing their local Internet service provider, the user could "call out" at high speed to services around the world, so the need for long-distance data calls was generally eliminated. As a result of this shift, there was no real need to limit the user to the speed of the long-distance lines, giving the Bell companies flexibility in terms of what to install at the user's site. Their attention turned to Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), which ran over the existing wiring and did not block a telephone connection in the process. The end-user was offered much higher speeds while still being able to use existing phones, with the added "benefit" of helping tie the user to the telephone company's own ISP. Hayes, having bet the company on a system that was never actually deployed, had no new products in the pipeline. In an attempt at diversification in January 1991 it had acquired most of the assets of local area