Darren Nickerson wrote:
I'm curious though, in an earlier message you wrote:
"Sending is also quite good, however, there are some quirks with the
Patton
firmware which need to be resolved for me to be completely delighted."
Are these issues you refer to just cosmetic 'nice to haves' or do they
actually impact the outbound success rate? Is the 2977's outbound in
Class 1 as solid as the Mainpine or Multitech boards now? Our
experience has shown that is not the case ...
Having worked extensively with modems such as MultiTechs and MainPines
which use the Lucent/Agere Venus chipset, modems such as Comtrol
RocketModems (II not I or III) that use the Rockwell/Conexant K56
chipset, and the Patton 2977 (which along with the Digi AccelePort RAS
uses an ADI chipset) I can say unequivocally that the former two _can_
currently outperform the latter.
But allow me to put that performance difference into perspective ...
depending upon the locale I can see 99.9% success rates (ratio is pages
without error divided by total pages received) with MultiTechs,
Mainpines, and Comtrols. By comparison, the performance that I see with
the Patton 2977 averages somewhere between 99.7% and 99.8% success
ratio. That said, I have seen deployments of the former two chipsets
underperform those statistics under "normal" conditions (say 98% to 99%)
simply because they frequently send to or receive from a very
problematic fax machine on the other end... and still the owners of
those fax servers are quite happy with how those perform. In fact, I
know of HylaFAX deployments that use USR modems and suffer at around 95%
success ratio, and the problems even there aren't enough to motivate
them to buy better modems. So the performance of the Patton 2977
shouldn't be considered "bad"... just not as good as I think it should
be. Furthermore, when we're talking about digital phone lines and
digital fax equipment, I should think that could eliminate 50% of the
potential pitfalls right there... and if the other end is also using
digtial then communication should be flawless, right? Well, that's my
idea anyway... it doesn't work out that way.
I'm a finicky faxer. One error in a thousand pages may seem
extraordinary to some, but when thousands upon thousands of pages are
handled every day the 0.1% is annoying if not frustrating.
I could elaborate on the specific flaws in the Patton cards, I suppose,
but this isn't the time or place. I suppose that I could also elaborate
on flaws in just about any other fax modem hardware that I've used
extensively, too. However, the trick isn't so much finding and using a
flawless piece of equipment (because there isn't such a thing), but
rather learning to avoid, fix, and deal with the issues as they appear.
And this is why I have such a hard time favoring fax Class 2 and to a
greater extent fax Class "proxies" like the Diva Server... because they
take away so much of the control that is necessary to avoid, fix, and deal.
My hope in IAXmodem is merely to extend that aspect of control into the
DCE and DSP.
Lee.
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