RE: (ASCEND) Celebrity Death Match

[fergus@email.com]

The 5200 is gutless, yes. Not a bad effort considering it was Cisco's first E1/T1 RAS foray. Pity about the modems though. 

I'm sure as soon as this market stabilises remote users on corporate networks will be extensions of the LAN/WAN infrastructure. There is still a smell of terminal servers and modem banks about the whole thing. 

At the moment our remote access system is Ascend tacked on to a massive Cisco network. It is a pain in the neck. Between the three techs in my team we spend approximately 30% of our time looking after the Ascend & ACE system (2 maxes - 800 users - ~40 concurrent) and 70% looking after the entire Europe, Middle East and Africa network (> 100 Cisco 5500 & 7500 - > 9,500 seats).

I'm no maths expert but that certainly doesn't seem to add up. In any case I've never heard of anyone who's 100% happy with their RAS kit, whatever the brand. This is usually because modems suck. They've always sucked, and they always will suck. Death to them. I'm not even going to start on end-users.....

I've worked with both the Cisco & the Ascend kit, and with the more powerful Cisco AS range I don't think there's much between them. I'm a believer in standardisation - heterogenous networks are difficult enough - maybe that should be the main consideration when trying  to decide between them.

Anyway we're the poor chumps who have to install and support these things - Cisco & Ascend do a brilliant job of slagging each other off in their marketing material - maybe we should leave it up to them.

Rgds....

-----Original Message-----
From:	T. D. Wolf [SMTP:direwolf@ritalin.shout.net]
Sent:	Friday, March 05, 1999 6:08 PM
To:	ascend-users@max.bungi.com
Subject:	(ASCEND) Celebrity Death Match

Our Cisco Access Servers stay up for six months or more -- we
reboot when we upgrade software or lose a UPS.  I've been reading
this list for two years.  Ascend users brag about uptimes of two
weeks.

We're getting great connect speeds with the MicroCom modems.  
The V.90 code wasn't released 'til after Ascend had it in the
beta and incremental releases.  But it was pretty solid from
the beginning, and Cisco didn't break 10 other things at the
same time.  We have outstanding compatibility with our clients'
modems.  A lot of Ascend users still complain they don't have
a stable V.90 release.

OSPF and interchassis stacking work correctly.  Turning on
stacking with our Ascend Maxes only made them that much flakier.

If you have any Cisco AS5xxx series boxes that disappointed you
and you want to get rid of them cheap, please send them here.
I'll swap for Max 1800's.  And maybe a Pipeline or two.  The 
Netopia and Bay Networks routers interoperate with the real world
much better.

Mike Berger
Shouting Ground Technologies, Inc.


> ------------------------------
> 
> From: Joe  Shaw <jshaw@insync.net>
> Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 14:13:14 -0600 (CST)
> Subject: Re: [OFF TOPIC] Re: (ASCEND) How Ascend should fix thier software problem
> 
> The 5300 and 5800's are much more powerful beasties than the 5200, which
> is by far the worst POS for RAS on the market.  That's where the problem
> lies.  Well, that and the microcom modems.  They currently use Mica
> modems, corrct?
> 
> - --
> Joseph W. Shaw - jshaw@insync.net    
> Freelance Computer Security Consultant and Perl Programmer
> Free UNIX advocate - "I hack, therefore I am."
> 
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