Robert Cain says:
Please embarass me. Do you always approch things with the hostility I am sensing, Perry?
No, but I've got a shock proof shit detector and you are triggering it. One of the things that sets it off is odd claims being made before implementation. You are making a very odd claim, which is that you can beat the price on a Rockwell integrated modem module by building
That's not what he said. He said 'modem', and as a consumer item that's far from a 'Rockwell integrated modem module'... That part is a small part of the whole price of the modem, which you'd know if you looked at price sheets. For a 99 modem (which I see all the time with 14400 fax/data), the modem chip is probably $15-20. The accepted minimum markup on a manufactured item is 50% of selling price. Of course, you can cut the margin if you sell enough of them, and it's hard to say what the manuf. margin on a $99 modem is. In anycase, he's talking about a slower modem, effectively, using a DSP (Zyxels, which beat most modems on features and performance have always used DSP's: they do data, fax, voice, callerid, touch tone recognition, etc. They include a 68K and >512K ram (I think)).
something yourself -- given the economies of scale, a weird statement. You are also claiming that given that you need to have a DSP doing your modem work, and processing power to do your cryptography and DSP horsepower to do your vocoder, you are still going to be able to beat the price of mass-market modems that are falling to the $100 range with your non-mass market product. Frankly, it sounds like a load of crap. I might be wrong, of course -- I've been wrong before. However, when people make strange claims to me about things they haven't finished implementing yet that they don't sell, especially after they've made lots of mistakes in their postings the previous week, it sets off alarm bells in my head. I'm not saying its impossible, but I'm saying that until you give me more evidence I'm not going to think that your claim is credible, and I don't think any other reasoning person should, either.
Well, he certainly might not succeed, but it sounds plausible to me. sdw -- Stephen D. Williams Local Internet Gateway Co.; SDW Systems 513 496-5223APager LIG dev./sales Internet: sdw@lig.net sdw@meaddata.com OO R&D Source Dist. By Horse: 2464 Rosina Dr., Miamisburg, OH 45342-6430 Comm. Consulting ICBM: 39 34N 85 15W I love it when a plan comes together