On 10/18/06, Tothwolf <tothwolf at concentric.net> wrote: If I understand their business model, they charged a premium, but what the customer gained was a single place to go (one catalog, one vendor to send POs to, etc), and some "big name" reassurance. In my experience, large companies deal with small companies poorly or not at all. If a small company comes up with a nice comms-related widget, they can try to sell it themselves with potentially mixed success, or sell quantities in black enclosures through Black Box and get instant exposure when the next catalog comes out. I'm not familiar with that one. We had several analyzers (HP) and BERT boxes (bit error-rate tester?) when I worked at Software Results making sync comms hardware - fortunately I got to take my pick when the doors closed. I still have a bunch of that kit, and it's still useful since most of the gear does async as well as sync. If your analyzer only goes to 38Kbps, it's probably async only. Sync stuff I've worked with, tended to go up to 64Kbps or even 128Kbps (if it wasn't designed for T1-like connections). -ethan