> I have managed USR TC's before and I absolutely hated it. However from
> the customer's perspective the modem code is what they encounter first
> and a clean connect *might* be worth the additional hassle of dealing
> with USR both product and company wise. Personally I'd rather Lucent
> improve the PM3.
>
> Also we have POP's all over the place and it's not practical to have
> both PM3 and USR in all the POP's.
*might* be worth the additonal hassle?
<start of rant, not directed at anyone personally>
This has been beaten into me countless time, I might as well pass on the
legacy. Being able to dial up to you with a modem is the fundamental
reason for somebody to get an account with you. If they can't connect to
you at all or have a very poor connection, there there is very little
reason for the customer to continue their account with you. A
super-feature account backed with friendly people will not keep a customer
if they can't even *connect* well. Throw in competitors that they can
connect to well, and guess what happens.
I have 5 PM3s across different POPs, and not a day goes by that we are not
having to twiddle with init strings, try comma tricks, force modems to
V.34, etc with customer modems to get them to even *handshake* with the
PM3s. The amount of customers we have had to send away over time due to
modem connection issues is non-trivial, and has forced me to bring back
analog modems in half of my POPs to try supporting people that can not
connect to our PM3s.
Now, I started buying USR HiPer bundles to complement, if not replace, all
of our PM3s, and thus far I have been very pleased with the HiPer ARC/DSP
setups with regard to modem compatiblity. Usually when we cut a pop over
from analog service to PM3s, we spend the next week or three ironing out
modem connections. The last cut over to a USR we did, exactly two
customers had problems, that were easily fixed. God knows I have been a
Portmaster bigot, and hated USR for the longest due to their strong-arm
marketing (recall 'switch your isp because they're not running x2'
spams?).
I originally thought I needed OSPF running on our NAS boxen, but now have
learned that this is not necessary. RIPv2 works just as well, especially
when you keep the RIPv2 inside each POP by redistributing RIPv2 routes
into your OSPF/EIGRP on your border routers at the given POP.
Yes, to USR-virgins, the HiPers are a bitch to set up, TCM and the CLI
take a while to get used to. The HiPers are large, loud, and heavy, but
so what? You bolt them to a rack in your equipment cages and forget them.
Heat with the DSP cards is a non issue. Per inch you can cram more modems
into a USR than you can a PM3 with the HiPer DSPs.
I can not speak for the Netservers, however I can speak on experience with
the PM2, PM3, and HiPer ARC setups. I would much rather take a while
longer to take the extra bit of time to config a USR rack which I think
has better overall modem code, than I would learning the ins and
outs of every V.90 modem that comes along with compatibility issues
against the PM3, then explain to my customer why they need to get another
modem or why they can't connect to us.
YMMV, I have talked at length with some PM3 shops who think it is the
greatest thing that has come along, very few problems. On the other hand,
investing in the PM3s is close to being one of the biggest mistakes I've
made, my money is on USR from now on.
To everyone else, please do not pass judgement on a piece of equipment
that you have zero production experience with; the Netserver and HiPer
are two different animals. I will not say the PM4 sucks based on
experience with the PM3, simply because I have not ran a PM4.
</rant>
--- Bryan Wann bwann@cwis.net CWIS Internet Services http://www.cwis.net 918-967-2858Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime; Enlighten him further, and he opens a chain of seafood restaurants
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