I posted the following message to an interested party at 3Com at their request. It will be interesting to see what the results are, especially since this isn't bogus and I am entertaining quotes to replace the entire mess. *** I have reached a decision point on the growth and maintenance of my Total Control Hubs. Over the past six months the reports of modem connection problems have increased significantly. I had been hoping that this wasn't really occuring until last evening when my wife and I were discussing our modem problems over dinner with two couples who are our best friends. They confided that they both were having very significant connection problems, basically indicating that it was not unusual for the connection to be dropped within three minutes. We were not at all pleased to learn this, particularly from them. We use a combination of quads and hiperdsp's with a hiperarc and standard nmc. The code level is one version back from what has just been released on the website. We are considering upgrading to the hipernmc, but are very reluctant to give up the quads as they support trash modems (more below) better than the hiperdsp's. I attribute this rise in connectivity issues to more of our customers upgrading their computers with systems containing new, cheap modems. We can no longer count on good USR modems being the predominate device in the field, and the new USR winmodems are almost as bad as the no-name trash. But that is what the customers are getting in their new systems. They are having real problems connecting to us, but no problems connecting to our competitors Cisco system. I also have contacts with ISP's who are dumping 3Com to move to Patton devices and Lucent devices. The reasons vary widely, some of them based in the support issues surrounding the 3Com systems, but for me I am paying attention to their success in getting reliable connections. I mentioned support issues... I assumed you knew what I am talking about. The cost of support and availability of support in terms of addressing the problems I and other ISP's are having is overwhelming, especially when we are still fighting the same issues after two years. It also seems that 3Com is shutting down methods of providing service, such as the new server, that were very effective at providing timely reponses to queries from users. Personally, I don't mind paying for support if I think I am getting some benefit and value out of it. But I really want existing issues fixed before you start modifying the system to support my competitor, the cable company, or other 'neato' features. And as for the cost of replacement contracts, I can now purchase a complete chassis, guaranteed to work, for less than the cost of the support you are offering. Or, I can buy individual modules at very affordable rates and get overnight delivery without any contract hassles (I don't want any hassles like some ISP's have apparently had). That just doesn't make sense. We are not currently on support, though we are looking at the software support option again to see if that addresses the connectivity problems. If not, it is likely that we won't be needing support on the 3Com chassis's anyway as they will be someone else's problem. Mark Thornton San Marcos Internet, Inc. 512-393-5300 - 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.