Re: flexfax: Totally Stumped...

[Shuvam Misra <shuvam@spacenetindia.com>]

Dear Robert,

| >I'm paying my telco for about a hundred such calls a day, I should
| >think. Welcome to the club.
| 
| In Australia one local phone call costs A25c times 100 per day = $A25
| A new modem a USR Courier which is known to work costs in the region of $A300
| 
| From above after ~2 weeks it is cheaper to buy a new modem than continue
| running your current system.

That's exactly what I've been thinking too. I pay Rs1.40 per local call,
so it becomes Rs.150 to Rs.200 per day or so (I get more than a hundred
errors a day). In thirty days, I waste Rs.6,000. A USR Courier costs
about Rs.20,000 here, I guess. My ZyXEL Omni costs about Rs.12,000
here. So even though my figures are not as good as your two-week figure,
it's still bad enough to let me buy a new modem in a month or two.

However, I've decided to hold on because ZyXEL seems to be taking the
remarkable step of actually setting up Linux, Hylafax, and an Omni in
their Taiwan R&D centre, and have assured me that they are seriously
looking into it. I'm hoping that this might lead to something. ZyXEL has a
tradition for technical excellence and good R&D teams, and they've never
really been in the mass market like Zoom modems or USR Sportsters. So we
are hopeful that their techie culture will push them on. I'll watch for a
month more, and then switch if I don't hear anything concrete from ZyXEL.

They have already sent me a beta version of their Omni firmware to
correct a less important problem: the ZyXEL's inability to handle the
"@" at the end of the "ATDT" dialstring. (This problem is documented
with Hylafax literature.) I've not yet tried it out, because I didn't
get the time for it.

regards,
Shuvam