Mgetty - USR/Voice

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    To:  gerhard@ats.xs4all.nl (Gerhard Ahuis)
    Subject:  Re: Mgetty - USR/Voice
    Cc:  sokolosk@socket.cuug.ab.ca, mgetty@muc.de
    Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 23:34:19 BST
    From:  gert@greenie.muc.de (Gert Doering)

    Hi,
    
    Gerhard Ahuis wrote:
    > My USR Courier is working fine with MGetty and it perfectly detects fax 
    > and modem calls, even when an old fax without recognition tones is 
    > dialing in. (My old 14K4 Supra doesn't).
    
    Did you ever try fax polling? It's really good for a few surprises :)
    
    I didn't try the data/fax detection, but a friend has his USR Courier
    longer than I had the test model (10 days), and he says that fairly
    regularily some data call is "detected" as fax.

The Courier is a fine data modem but definitely a notch behind other
modems when it comes to Class 2/2.0 fax support.  Besides the lack of
polling, it also does not support 2D-encoded data transmission.  Older
firmware revisions also used to lie about supporting copy quality
checking; it appears the 07/05/95 rev (the one that added 33.6K data
rates) actually might implement it (at least this rev lets you set
AT+FCQ=1,1 unlike the others).  More importantly, my experience is that
the Courier does not do as good a job of handling poor line conditions
when sending facsimile and/or does not deal with facsimile machines
that are slightly "off" from the CCITT spec.  I contrast this with a
Multi-Tech 1432BA or 2834BA which has the best Class 2 firmware I know
of (including an excellent adaptive-answer implementation).  The ZyXEL
U1496 w/ rev 6.14 firmware is also very good; more featureful than the
Multi-Tech but possibly a touch less robust in its protocol implementation
(it's hard for me to say since my statistics are far more meaningful
for the MT1432BA than for my 1496E).

Basically I recommend only the Multi-Tech BA and ZyXEL 1496 models
to people trying to do high-volume fax work.  The Courier has the
hardware to be as good, but USR will have to put a lot more work into
its firmware before it's on a par with these other modems.

	Sam