Re: [hylafax-users] problems with Multitech Modem MT 2834ZDXb

[Karl Denninger <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I know the Hylafax folks did.

That's why I bought them originally.

The receive problems made them anchors as far as I was concerned.  Fully
half of those who tried to fax into them were unsuccessful in my
experience.

The errors this gent is reporting matched - exactly - my experience with
them.

I got ZERO help (other than the "change the S/N parameter") at the time I
had trouble, and ultimately ended up "eating" them, as I could not return
them by the time the attempts to help ran out and there was no further
assistance forthcoming.

Yes, I'm aware that there is no such thing as a perfect modem.  

However, the troubling common point behind all this is that somehow, my
various fax machines, many made by HP (various "all in one" products) over
the years have NEVER failed to send or receive a fax.  Not once.  Oh sure,
a couple of times they ran into a noisy line and had to have the transmission
resent, but never once did I find a machine on the other end that would 
simply not talk to these machines.

This happens <ALL THE TIME> with "fax modems", irrespective of brand, and
there are people out there, myself included, who consider it completely
unacceptable behavior bordering on false advertising when a company sells
a modem claiming fax compatability that in fact can talk to WELL UNDER 100%
of the fax machines out here.  I can see the occasional (as in under a 1%)
failure rate, but my experience is that the "fail to connect and/or
send/receive") rate is closer to 10% - and in some cases even worse.  In
some cases the modems can reliably send but not receive, or vice-versa.

When operating in Class 2 (or 2.0, etc) mode this is NOT the software's
fault on the other end - its the modem's fault.

The best fax modems I ran across in my more than 10 years of doing this
stuff were the Telebit T3000s.  They are way obsolete these days, of
course, but I had a stack of a dozen of them running at my former company
and we literally sent out and received HUNDREDS of faxes every day, with
very, very few problems.  We had to "hand fax" perhaps ONE transmission
every two or three days.  That's a failure rate of under 1% - and was quite
acceptable.

I've yet to find a fax modem made in the last five years that comes 
anywhere close to their reliability in terms of being able to actually 
talk to fax machines.

--
-- 
Karl Denninger (karl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) Internet Consultant & Kids Rights Activist
http://www.denninger.net	Tired of spam at your company?  LOOK HERE!
http://childrens-justice.org	Working for family and children's rights
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On Mon, Oct 06, 2003 at 03:10:12PM -0500, Steve Tuckner wrote:
> I don't want to get into a flame war about these modems, but many vendors
> recommended this modem for many years (the 1932ZDX was a bit better for some
> reason -- it had a different data pump) as their top modem. The Hylafax
> website recommended it without any reservations on their recommended modems
> web page (http://www.hylafax.org/Modems/index.html).
> 
> That said, it is not a perfect modem and it is hard to find one of those. It
> has particularly had problems with receive that was data pump related (which
> is nothing we could fix any how since we got the DSP code from our
> supplier -- Lucent at the time).
> 
> Steve Tuckner
> Multi-Tech Systems

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