wunder@hpcea.CE.HP.COM (Walter Underwood) (03/31/88)
It seems very few folks have used V.32 modems yet; ... Well, we've been using a pair of V.32 modems for over a year, except for when one of them died, and spent several weeks being fixed. We run HDLC over them, between a pair of cisco gateways. We dial up, wait for the ciscos to exchange routes, then do a few FTP's or whatever. Good for diagnostic links, too. We also used these for a secondary link from the Usenix floor to HP. The big link was a 56Kbit satellite channel. It was neat to watch the cisco send small packets over the 9.6 terrestrial and big packets over the satellite link. V.32 was designed for syncronous links, and works best for that. There is no "standard" like Hayes for autodial on sync lines. Some modems don't have autodial at all, some have a separate async port, and some may have some sync magic. That may be what is meant by "not all V.32 modems will work together", i.e. not all work the same with the host. We have not tried interoperability between different brands of modems. Ours are from CDS. As I said, we had one die after a few months, and it took a while to get fixed. Ours don't have autodial. I don't think we've had any other problems, though I'm not the person who deals directly with that HW. wunder