Do you have problems with the latest Ascend / Lucent MAX 3000 router ?
The MAX 3000 is as flat as a MAX1800 / 2000 but longer and very heavy. OK, now we got one lately in June 2003. But it is broken.
This MAX 3000 is the latest and youngest development of all MAXen. It has some really good advantages with its new universal generic main-board design. Initially it came with a 50 Mhz PPC. That means it has a lot of power.
It has 2 (T1 or E1) PRI WAN ports or it has 6 (S or U) ISDN BRI WAN ports - and it has more memory (RAM and flash - both with sockets) than a MAX 1800 / 2000 or MAX 4000.
It must be run with TAOS above 9.0.1 or later and that is a lot !! You may plug in an encryption DIM processor in any empty slot and some other features.
You can no more run old modem cards, you must add dedicated MAX 3000 modem-cards. A better description is here.
The MAX 3000 has no more the Intel I960 risc CPU, it has special ASIC´s (ARM cpu´s) to handle the dedicated communication jobs. It was designed late 1998 from Ascend / continued 1999 with Lucent after the MAX 6000 came out and some weaknesses on that platform have been seen.
As we know since June 2003, the MAX 3000 has a very flexible production layout on its motherboard, either 2 E1/T1 WAN ports or 6 BRI-S or BRI-U WAN ports, but not both.
So it substitutes the MAX 1800 and the MAX 2000 both with one board design.
For the providers, the heat independant power supply is very important. It seems that the Ascend people did learn from the weak 4000 supplies and the huge 6000 supply.
The 3000 supply is a very small but powerful u-form unit from power-one, a well known source, which did the transformer based units from very old "Molecular Computers" in 1984. Very good design, very small and very powerful.
And they did learn to have a cooling concept for all needs. The MAX 3000 has seven fans.
Why so late ?
However, the MAX 3000 came into the market to late. The market for Lucent MAX products was dramatically crashing down as many other competitors did start with similar products with same and / or better features. At the same time many ISP´s did give up and a lot of MAX 2000´s and MAX 4000´s have been available for low budget, than to spend 10.ooo Dollars for that unit.
Prior to June 2003 we have not had one yet. So we dont know much about the sales numbers in Germany or Europe.
There are no negative rumours heard beside the high price. We will have some more pictures and some comments about the hardware design found inside the 3000.