Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 01:32:11 -0800 (PST) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <freebsd@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> To: saper@system.pl (Marcin Cieslak) Cc: jcwells@u.washington.edu (Jason C. Wells), imp@village.org (Warner Losh), freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Warner's PCI Modem Driver Message-ID: <200001270932.BAA76333@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0001270850400.4465-100000@tricord.system.pl> from Marcin Cieslak at "Jan 27, 2000 08:58:41 am"
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> On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, Jason C. Wells wrote: > > > The guy at the shop said, "That's > > stragne. I have a policy against carrying win-modems. Apparently, there > > was some lack of indication that it was a winmodem. He then assumed it > > wasnt a winmodem. > > Few facts from my experience: > > 1. A producer lies to distributor. Distributors lie to shop managers. > Shop managers lie to us, the customers. <SOAPBOX> From mine. 1. Produced doesn't tell distributor much of anything. Stupid buyer at distributor is simply driven by cost, cheap is good. 2. Stupid sales person at distributor doesn't even know what a winmodem, uart, or irq is. All he knows is he has these sku numbers at this price and may or may not have X in stock, often can not even give you a manufacture model/make/sku on what he has to sell. He tells buyer on a contrinuous bases you need to find me cheaper Z's, my customers are balking at these prices. 3. Shop manager may or may not be cluefull. (We think we are cluefull, others think they are too.) He's got customers telling him all day long ``cheap, cheap, cheap, we want cheap''. Shop buyer orders the cheapest Z he can find, not carrying or knowing if it is good or not, unless he happens to be cluefull and gives a rats ass about what he sells or just about the bottom line and how many $/month he can move. Bottom line, from some one in the busines for 10 years, you the consumer are getting just what you have been telling us the reseller you want, who have passed it right up the chain ``cheap parts''. Now us, being cluefull, know that winmodems produce post sales technical support nightmares from the clueless lusers who only think they want the cheapest thing on the market, when they really want the highest performance yet cost effective solution on the market, refuse to buy, stock, or sell winmodems. I even have a sign on our price board where PCI modems go ``Show me one that works and I will get it for you''. A few people have taken me up on it and our now proud owners of either USR or Actiontec products. We stock and sell the Jaton Modulator ISA modem, www.jaton.com, it is a fine Rockwell Chipset hardware controller based modem, and other than fairly high DOA rates it has served our customers well. There are the 3 listed modems in the URL someone else pointed out. The USR is what I would have recommended until 3Com bought them. We are not fans of 3Com, especially with how some of the USR support stuff went away when they purchased that business, especially with respect to any of USR's networking equipment. I can show you lots of software, legacy all right, that won't deal with a PCI modems, even controller based ones, due to it having hard coded I/O addresses and such other legacy crap. </SOAPBOX> > For example, the guy - wholesaler tried to convince me that > Winmodems are modems without a DSP (Digital Signalling Processor)! He is somewhat correct, Winmodems have no _hardware_ DSP, they use the host processor to do the DSPing. > So nearly _all_ operations have to be carried out in hardware. That part his is wrong on, it uses a software DSP. > I told him, on the other hand - and asked him to verify - > that all his cheap PCI modems do not have an UART > (Universal Asynchrononus Receiver/Transmitter) like old NS16450A > or compatible. Real modem requires at least 2 large chips :). Modern modems do not have a UART, even the hardware controller based ISA modems, and the USR and Actiontec PCI modems. Data is actually easier to DSP if handed to you in parallel. In the 2 chip solution one chip is the host interface (it mearly looks and/or behaves like a UART, but it does not serialize the data) and DSP, the second chip is the analog line interface. They used 2 chips as it use to be really dicey to try and do this on one substate but newer technologies can deal with it easy enough. > He remained unconvinced, but this is UART which makes the modem > supported on all good operating systems. It is an 8250/16x50 compliant hardware interface, there is no UART. > Many Winmodems are unsupported under Windows NT too. Because it is not cheap to develope host based DSP code for NT compared to the number of sales it would generate because NT won't let you go hacking directly at internal parts of it to make sure you get control of all things when you are trying to DSP modem signals. > I am not sure but I think that Winmodem is a trademark of 3Com. > > 2. I have a customer who returned a PCI modem (he said we > may give it away to charity) and bought a nice ISA internal one. > He couldn't stand it although he was using ... Windows on > a somewhat powerful hardware. > > ISA internal modems are good and safe, as long as there are > boards with at least one ISA slot. ISA modems are _NOT_ safe, many of them are now win modems. Infact it is getting very very hard to find non winmodems of any kind, PCI, ISA, PCMCIA, etc. Jaton had a supply problem for 2 weeks and I tried to hunt down an alternative and had very little luck finding any one with units in stock other than the over priced USR units. P.S. The next guy who walks through my door and says ``give me the cheapest modem you have'' is going to get a 55 gallon drum of win modems dumped over his head, he can pick one and have it for $5.00, no tech support from us avaliable :-) -- Rod Grimes - KD7CAX @ CN85sl - (RWG25) rgrimes@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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