Here's my take -- NO I will not renew the one contract I have for reasons already mentioned multiple times: having to buy contracts for everything, paying for working code when I aready paid for it, I dont need the support thanks to you guys and it's much cheaper to keep spare equipment than to pay for a promise of next day delivery. It only cost's 10000 for a complete spare unit. What I will do is continue to buy equipment and every 90 days or so I can have access to the total control site. I will continue to beat up my suppliers and make them BREAK THE RULES! rather have myself break them. Little gray area there for ya! As far as going with Ascend, as if that was even a choice at stage, I don't know ascend and couldn't comment on thier quality or not. Grass is always greener?? I see no point in getting all pissed off at 3com, Let them do what they do and the market will take care of the rest. If they really do such a lousy job then they will fade like so many before them. On another point, I had a 3com "engineer" comeon-site to help. He wasn't much more than an installation tech. He got sent home. What we do is find the brightest 3 guys on this list and hire them to come on-site. just my 1 Cent. -----Original Message----- From: owner-usr-tc@lists.xmission.com [mailto:owner-usr-tc@lists.xmission.com]On Behalf Of Jeff Mcadams Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 7:16 AM To: usr-tc@lists.xmission.com Cc: bruce_claflin@mw.3com.com; karl_swanson@mw.3com.com; thomas_goodman@mw.3com.com; george_ebert@mw.3com.com; glenn_gibney@mw.3com.com; irfan_ali@mw.3com.com Subject: (usr-tc) Support Contract survey OK...here are initial results of the support contract informal survey. I only heard from 13 people (including myself :)...a mere fraction of the number of people on the list in total. Keep sending the information...I'll continue to tabulate and have more updates as I hear from more people. The current count is 9 people don't have support contracts, and 4 do. Some notes: - One "yes" only had software coverage even though they would have liked to have greater coverage. They had to settle for software-only because of the cost - One "no" actually has coverage on a chassis, but only because that chassis was bought new and came with coverage...apparently you can't buy a chassis anymore without coverage...interesting loophole in the contract rules here. This person indicated that they would rather have *not* gotten the coverage on the contract as they thought it was a waste of money. Many of the people that emailed me as a "no" mentioned it was the cost and/or the rules that prevented them from getting a contract. I will re-iterate that I believe that the root of the problem stems from 3Com considering Customer Service as a "Business Unit". In other words, they want Customer Service to be a revenue positive part of 3Com. While my previous posting that discussed this was somewhat inaccurate (the Customer Service Organization, CSO, apparently doens't get the revenues from the support contracts, the business unit that sells the equipment - in the case of TC, its the Network Systems Business Unit - gets the revenues...the whole thought of trying to make Customer Service revenue positive ends up with an attitude that ends up screwing the customer. I just recently went through the process of trying to obtain a service contract again...partially to try to determine if any improvements had been made to the process...partially to find out if the "Unbundled Service Options" on 3Com's web site would be useful here...and partially because we really would like to have some coverage on some of our equipment. The current status is that the support coverage rules are still in place (contracts purchased per-chassis rather than per-card, and all chassis at a site have to have the same coverage...of course last time we tried to have different coverage at different sites 3Com didn't honor it), the support options listed as sold items (ie, not special deals that are made for specific instances) were largely the same as they've been for the past 3 years. The best I got from the discussion was that service options could be discussed (ie, a special deal is how I understand this) if its "a sound business case that makes sense for the customer and for 3Com." Let me suggest that a sound business case for 3Com would be to not lose their customers which is what is happening...3Com is verging towards losing us as a customer even...and we've been a USRobotics/3Com customer for at least 5 years (35 Amp power supplied and dual analog 14.4 modems) -- Jeff McAdams Email: jeffm@iglou.com Head Network Administrator Voice: (502) 966-3848 IgLou Internet Services (800) 436-4456 - To unsubscribe to usr-tc, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe usr-tc" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. - To unsubscribe to usr-tc, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe usr-tc" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message.