Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 23:06:37 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> To: dennis <dennis@etinc.com> Cc: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Bragging rights.. Message-ID: <30873C6D.59E2B600@FreeBSD.org> References: <199510200052.UAA29399@etinc.com>
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dennis wrote: > Actually, Dennis started this thread by trying to get a price reference for > the Async solution that Jordan referred to....I did not start it by saying > that sync is better than async. My point was that if for about the same > money you can have a more flexible solution that will use less of your CPU > it is worth considering. Unlike most of you, my perspective is All true, and now that we've established that the basic cost of entry (not counting the line itself) for a TA and a serial card is about $650 (or 2X if you're responsible for both sides), the final question simply remains as to whether the cost *increment* to get that last 38.9% or so is worth it. I'm not saying it is or isn't either way, and 38.9% is certainly nothing to sneeze at (that's basically one V.34 modem's worth of pipe you're *losing*), but if sync serial cards cost half again what the TAs cost, well, that's a steep knee in the price/performance curve too! :( That's why I was optimistic about the ISDN card solutions: They're cheaper than TAs, they give you your full 128K, and when drivers become available (and they will, I am confident) they are just as plug-n-play as a TA to anyone reasonably competent with a screwdriver. People are plugging in their own VGA cards, I suppose they can handle an ISDN card! :) However, you've already said that you don't like the ISDN cards and consider them too limited, so we're back to the cost argument again. Maybe what's needed is a low-end sync serial card that doesn't cost much more than $150 and does everything up to 512K or so on one port. Target it at the end user who only has (and needs) one connection and might go frac-T1 someday but will most likely be pottering around at 128Kb for some time. Let's face it, most of us will never have a T1 at home. We will dream about it, but that's going to be the premium business pipe for some time and I don't expect it to fall within the reach of mere mortals anytime soon! If I'm even going 256K by the end of '96 I'll be pretty happy. So I would have need for a pair of sync-serial cards that were cheap and would do everything up to this data rate for at least 2 years, and that's all the service life I expect from *any* computer related component these days.. :-) I'm not an ISP, I'm an end-user and my needs and budget are rather different than the market you probably deal with ordinarily.. -- Jordan
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