One of my client ISP's has both USR hiperdsp's and Ascend MAX's. I've noticed that the Max's seem to perform better (ratio of successful connects, number of dropped connections) than the USR's, even when connecting to USR modems. About 2am this morning I had a flash of insight and drove into my office (I have a well-equipped home lab, but needed access to a 4-wire interface. Not much traffic at 2am, and no trouble finding a parking space downtown.) It was worth the trip, I think I hit pay dirt. What I tested was the level the server (ISP) modem was transmitting at. I was surprised to see that is was at -10dbm, which is quite hot. Beacuse of the way digital lines are coded, higher power levels have worse s/n ratios, there aren't at many quantitization bits available at higher powers. I plugged in my laptop, fired up tcm, and looked at the hiperdsp config. It was set for -11dbm. Hmmm. I set it for -15, and yup, I get -14 when I measure it. An off by one error someplace, no doubt. But it gets better. I call into our Max's and measured the level they were sending. Only -14dbm, much lower power, more what I was expecting. Telnet in and check to see what they are set to, -13dbm, another off by one, but this time in the opposite direction! Here's a summary: Configured for Actually sends USR HiperDSP -11dbm -10dbm Ascend Max -13dbm -14dbm I don't have any scripts in place that monitor failure ratios, but if someone does I'd be interested if they could set half their modems to -15dbm (for an output of -14dbm) and see what effect that has. -- Aaron Nabil - To unsubscribe to usr-tc, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe usr-tc" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message.