Some information about Multiband routers from Ascend:
(there are some new Multiband routers, will be explained later)
Here we found a real nice old Ascend logo within the the frontpanel of an Ascend unit.
In Jan. 2003 we got one Multiband Plus (from 1994) from ebay to have a look inside.
That seems to be the beginning. Later on we got a MAX 4000 Multiband and a MAX 1800 (the MBX18-BRI) and we got a MAX 6000 Multiband.
There is very few information about the Multibands. What we found out is that the Multibands are a lot more expensive, have some "hashcode enabled" features like X.21 and more and have some special boards inside the emty slots.
Important is, that at least the chassis hardware is identical with the normal MAXen and there seems to be a secret way to reduce the functions to a normal MAX, loosing the very expensive festures. Have a look at the MAX1800 page, there is a sample at the end.
This part was added after receiving an e-mail at Sept.1.2005 from an old Ascend expert:
A Max Multiband is simply a Max with an older marketing name and older hardware, it's predecessor was the Ascend Multiband (no 'Max' in the name). Ascend started out by manufacturing reverse Mux's, the modems and networking were an afterthought, you can see this in the older Max's that do not have an ethernet port. In thier case you were required to install an Ethernet card which also contained the HDLC support. Later versions of the Max that did have the onboard ethernet port still needed a version of the Ethernet card for HDLC support, but the Ethernet portion of the card had been removed. I did like the face plate of the Max Multiband better than the one on the later Max's, the pretty lights were removed to cut cost.
Thanks
We got some Multiband MAX 6000 from mid of 2001 but no documentation.
Below is an old Multiband Plus, whatever this was.
The result was, you should not buy it nor you should spend any time or any money in an old Multiband Plus from 1996 or earlier.
This Multiband is really old, there was built in an old 16 Bit network board but used with its 8 bit pc bus. Then there is inside a very small power supply and a really old weak AMD 80C188 CPU, well known as the little brother of the 8086. With 12 MHz it is weak on all edges.
The menu is slow and we didnt get the password out, there are no jumpers.
May be one feature was, that there are 4 host ports with X.21. But who wants to have X.21 on a weak system ?
We didnt find any information to reset any password. So please dont ask us, we cannot help.