I am writing this review for other subscribers of this newsgroup that always
seem to ask.. Which Modem should I buy. Before you read on, the answers are
not contained herein, but some insight in the problems of high speed modems
might be.
My wife brought home a new Supra v32bis Faxmodem a few weeks ago or so as a
loaner Modem until another one could be found. In this time, I have asked
for internet assistance once, and have called Supra Tech support for help in
trying to get the Modem to connect at 14.4. I never got there. The best
connection I ever got was at 12k and the throughput was greatly reduced
presumably in retransmits. In my call to Supra, they suggested I call their
bbs and measure the signal received quality. In his words, "We have a unique
situation here with all digital lines and therefore no noise is injected on
our end. Any noise on the line is from your end". He indicated that the
signal quality value should be interpreted as follows:
0-2 high speed connection will work fine.
< 15 it should be ok but no guarantee
> 15 probably not.
I had already done this in a previous connection and the value was around 50
or so. I wasn't about to call his BBS since the digital line stuff is bs as
far as I'm concerned.
At this point I'm not real happy. It seems to me they are saying, if you
have clean lines it will work great, if not, the problem isn't the Modem,
it's the lines. Look guys, it's not to difficult to design a Modem under
ideal line conditions, designing it to work in the real world is a different
story.
He also informed me to modify s109 and s110 to allow the modem to connect at
a lower rate and fall forward. This was useful and allowed the Modem to
connect most of the time. However, it almost always connect at 9600, once in
a while it does connect at 12k. There are a few sites that it won't connect
except at 2400 (Yes they are v32 sites!).
I reiterate, I never got a 14.4 connection. I tried to connect to a ZyXEL, a
Dual Standard and a Supra, none worked at high speed.
Btw, Fax worked fine. Busy detection worked flawlessly.
At this point, note that I use the Modem on two computers at home. On one
computer, the phone line is set up so that when the Modem is active, all
other phones in the house are switched out. On the other computer, it is a
typical connection, and the rest of the phones are still connected. Why do I
mention this... Read on.
Since I had all of the problems with the Supra, My wife ordered a Sportster
14.4 /Faxmodem. I initially connected it in the system that switched out all
of the phones. It connected every time at 14.4. Somewhat different from the
Supra which never connected at 14.4. I called the same systems as mentioned
previously without a hitch.
I then connected it to the other computer. It connected ok but the
throughput was terrible. I manually disconnected all of the phones in the
house and the problem went away. I found the offending phone was in the
garage and disconnected it. This offending phone had not seemed to affect the
Supra adversely. The Supra didn't work well with all phones disconnected or
on the line with the phones still connected.
Final thoughts (whew). The Sportster certainly worked better at my house.
There are a lot of people that claim they have a Supra that works great. I
am not one of these people.
Comments except for grammer...
Paul Astrachan
Motorola Telecom