We ordered a PM3 the day after the CT1 code was announced, based entirely
on the reputation of Livingston for having products which work. The
experience has not been entirely satisfactory.
Users who formerly dialed into a CT1 which went into a channel bank and
then into Multitech modems and into a PM2 are unable to stay connected
on the PM3 for the same length of time. Most of these are dedicated users
who are accustomed to seeing a redial once a week or more.
Now, I could hand-wave this to US West, except that it's the exact same
equipment on their end, different equipment on our end, and now it doesn't
work as well.
But there's something even worse: some substantial percentage of the time,
the PM3 does not detect the disconnect. I suspect this is related to the
early disconnect. That means that the line is held busy by the PM3! Thus,
when the dedicated user tries to dial back in to his dedicated line, he
gets a busy signal. (we work around this by putting a very low idle time
on such lines and pinging them every 2 minutes; when the PM3 resets an idle
line, the line goes normal)
If you are only using the PM3 for hunt group dialin, you probably won't
care too much, because the hunt group will roll over to the next line.
Still, though, if the user gets disconnected before they log in, the PM3
holds the line busy in "USERNAME" state forever, where there is no timeout.
We have to go through about once a day and reset lines which have become
unusable because the PM3 cannot tell that there's no one at the other end.
Also, the PM3 has crashed several times---compared to the PM2, which ran
for 6 months or more between crashes or problems.
I wouldn't be blathering about this so loudly in public, except that we
logged a call with Livingston (32798) about 2 days after we got our PM3,
which was about 5 weeks ago!!, Support has been good about responding
to pings and even occasionally calling us to say "we know you're out
there," but the politeness of the support group is not what fixes problems.
I entered another call into support@livingston.com on the same day, and
haven't heard back on that on at all. I hear folks at Livingston claiming
that the support queue goes to zero, but the only way that can be happening
is if they are deleting queries without answering them.
Something is terribly, terribly wrong either with the way that calls
are escalated, or the way that engineering resources are being allocated.
jms
Joel M Snyder, 1404 East Lind Road, Tucson, AZ, 85719
Phone: +1 520 324 0494 (voice) +1 520 324 0495 (FAX)
jms@Opus1.COM http://www.opus1.com/jms Opus One