Those still sound like high defection rates to me. We lose the majority
of our customers because of moves, etc. A very small minority changed
because of modem issues (this is mostly due to that "professional service"
that Robert doesn't think that we provide). We add customers about the
same rate, by the way.
> Their switch doesn't even support caller ID. Its just antiquated, so I
> don't know weather messing with it does anything to help.
My experience says that it depends. We have one location with a 30
(or something like that - antique in Internet years) year old switch and
mostly the customers are getting very good connections. Another location
with fiber and a 2 year old 5ESS is giving us crappy call completion
rates. This location has a competitor (with USR-TC) and AOL (USR-TC as
well) in the same telco and we've seen a high number of users who says
they get much better connections with the other providers. We've tried
changing the paddings, etc. but not much improvement so far. This wouldn't
be much of an issue if we can get ANY help from Livingston on telling
the Telco what to configure but apparently to use a PM3 I have to be a
switch engineer too (but hey, I can get it up and running in 10 minutes).
> Like the USR-TC being twice as much way back when? That is the main
> reason we went with the PM3, that and the PM2eR's worked flawlessly.
Actually my [main] reason was that at the time, the USR-TC was utterly
unreliable and unmanageable. They've improved the reliability a lot
since then. I was also hopelessly naive at the time in thinking that a
piece of digital equipment is a digital equipment, that there can't
possibly be anything to go wrong with it and that certainly it'd do better
than analog modems. How wrong I was.
What it comes to - I have always believed that Livingston was a fine
engineering company and that they'd make the best product. That hasn't
turned out to be the case with the modem code.
> I couldn't agree with you more on this. The biggest problem we have seen
> with the PM3 is that when initially setting up a CT-1 the telco gets no
> response from the PM3. It basically looks dead. You can plug a T-Berd
> into a PM3 and send all 0's or 1's all day long and get nothing back.
> Its pretty much a crap shoot getting lines provisioned for a PM3...
We haven't run into that. 100% of the time it's a Telco problem.
We're seeing a 20% success rate in getting the telco to configure the
hunt group correctly and then half of those times they'll screw up
something else. :-|
Tim
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