Zoom Telefonics, the makers of the Zoom modem? Can you tell me if they still have reliability problems?
I remember being responsible for bringing up a large client site in California. They ended up with over 8,000 active users who used an assortment of diferent modems. I also helped the team of people that dealt with the customers' modem problems. On our first pass, we were adjusting the modems on our side in order to reliably handle the largest group of dial-in users. On the next pass, we worked on adjusting the modems of the remaining few who were having problems dialing in to our system. In the end, we were able to have virtually all of our customers successfully dial-in to our system except for a few problematic cases. This is where we shipped them a modem that would work. The biggest problem by far that we had with a particular brand of modem was the Zoom modem. This brand of modem had problems connecting reliably to our system. No other modem brand had anywhere close to the problems that we experienced with Zoom. And the problems were not consistent between individual modems of the Zoom brand name. Many of them worked. However, there a significant number where no matter what we did, the modem consistenly had problems connecting to our mainframe. This was true even when we had the modem shipped to be tested by us. This brand of modem by far was the most unreliable modem out there. And I am talking from a sample of over 8000 diall-in users who used many different brands of modem out there, where for instance Cardinal was one more commonly used modems that turned out to be much better than the Zoom modem.
Zoom Telefonics may have their act together now. But back then which was a few years ago, they were a glowing example in their marketplace of the expression "you get what you pay for". This is also true of some other modem makers like Boca, despite the press releases they have published in the past telling everyone "it will be different this time". Boca has had serious quality control problems that lasted for as long as I had to support the modem, which was over 3 years. Given my experiences in supporting dial-in users, I would never look favorably on Zoom or Boca modems.
The Zoom modem may have changed by now, even though I have found that companies with this type of history that still manage to sell their modems rarely change. However, this does not necissarily mean the stock of either company will not move up. Investors rarely do their research when it comes to a company they consider investing in. It is also not uncommon for me to see analysts who are not able to see the obvious. I suspect either they did not do their researchr, or perhaps do not know how to research high-tech companies. But they give their opions on those companies anyway.
Bob Graham |
