Re: [hylafax-users] Cheap fax cards.

[Joe Phillips <jaiger@acm.org>]

On Wed, 2003-02-05 at 17:01, Erik Enge wrote:

> So, I've looked at buying Dialogic cards that have four ports on them
> (or, that can accept four telephone lines).  These are really expensive
> ($2000USD).  Why wouldn't I just get four internal modes for the price
> of $200USD instead?  Am I missing something here?

The trade off is:

- maximum port density - with COTS modems, at 1-port per PCI/ISA slot,
how many ports can you get into a system?  with a 4 or 8-port card, you
can get more ports in a single system, or free PCI/ISA slots for other
devices (NIC etc)

- minimum system resource overhead - COTS modems will eat up IRQs and
other system resources more quickly than special hardware.  RocketModem
cards I have used can have many boards share a single IRQ or even run
IRQ-less.  If you use external, COTS modems, you can gain similar
benefits from using high-end serial cards.

- common firmware revision across ports - your COTS modems may have
different firmware revisions and use unique HylaFAX configs per port
whereas a single RocketModem will use the same configuration on each
port - potentially saving your sanity.  "wait, ttyS2 is a Lucent, ttyS0
is a USR, ... Ugh"


good luck,

-joe


____________________ HylaFAX(tm) Users Mailing List _______________________
  To subscribe/unsubscribe, click http://lists.hylafax.org/cgi-bin/lsg2.cgi
 On UNIX: mail -s unsubscribe hylafax-users-request@hylafax.org < /dev/null
  *To learn about commercial HylaFAX(tm) support, mail sales@hylafax.org.*