Re: [hylafax-users] No response to MPS or EOP repeated 3 tries

["Darren Nickerson" <darren.nickerson@xxxxxxxx>]

> I am still wondering, as a prior list poster did - what exactly is so
> problematic about making computer faxmodems behave as interoperably as $30
> fax machines which have a printer, scanner, modem, and a self-contained
> power supply?

Could it be possible that the R&D and Engineering teams of Fujitsu, Canon,
HP, Epson are larger and better funded than those of ZyXEL, USR, Hayes,
MultiTech? Consider for a moment ... whereas a modem manufacturer sells the
modem in a single transaction and never sees the customer again, the
printer/scanners you mention above are widely accepted as loss-leaders. The
real money's in the ink cartridges and other consumables! I don't know what
the average cost of a multifunction device is over its useful lifetime, but
it's one helluva lot more than $30. That's money that can go back into R&D.

Analog modem manufacturers have traditionally presented the market with data
modems. The fax capability, then the voice capability ... these were "also
has" bonus features. When you get down into commodity pricing, there's not
much of a budget for fixing "minor" firmware problems ... and many of these
were primarily data devices anyway, serving as dial-in workhorses at mom &
pop ISPs all over the world. It's not that the R&D teams of these companies
didn't realize there were problems and want to fix them ... there just
wasn't any commercial incentive to do so, and therefore no budget for it.

An additional complication, highlighted recently by Steve Tucker, is the
reliance of many modem manufacturers on third-party fax implementations,
data pumps etc such as those from Agere/Lucent, Conexant etc. It's hard to
build an error-free product when you don't build it from the ground up!

In my experience, the market has generally been very accepting of fax class
2/2.x firmware problems. Perhaps it's hard to hold the manufacturer to task
when you only paid $29.99 for something, or perhaps very few people actually
watch their fax logs closely enough to see the problems. I'm not sure why,
but just as OS vendors aren't commercially motivated to ship operating
systems that are secure out of the box, modem manufacturers aren't
commercially motivated to ship error-free class2 firmware implementations.

My advice is to invest in a device whose primary! purpose is FAX if
possible, and whose company owns (and is expert in) all of the core
technology . Two examples of this are Brooktrout's TR1034 and EICON's Diva
Server. If the price point for these is out of your reach, I recommend
investing in a Multitech product, because they have shown an admirable
commitment to improving the fax functionality of their analog modems.

None of these solutions are cheap, and there's a reason for that. I don't
buy the argument that the world owes you something that's both cheap and
error free. There's a reason some consumer electronics, vehicles, etc are
more expensive than others ... sometimes it's just clever marketing, but
most of the time it's consumers paying the extra nickel for superior
features, performance and/or reliability.

> I blame the ITU / Global Engineering for super-expensive
protocol/standards documentation.

Don't blame them - they're better these days. Sign up for your three free!!!
downloads from the ITU, and go write some fax code ;-) Better yet, help Lee
complete his Class1 implementation and show them pesky modem folks how easy
it is! ;-)

-Darren

--
Darren Nickerson
Senior Sales & Support Engineer
iFax Solutions, Inc. www.ifax.com
darren.nickerson@xxxxxxxx
+1.215.438.4638 office
+1.215.243.8335 fax


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