OK, I'll jump in here too. We don't have support contracts. Never have. I would like to get software support, maybe, if it was reasonably priced... so far, we've been buying hardware at least every 90 days anyway so it hasn't yet been an issue. The cost of used cards has dropped to the point where it doesn't make sense to get hardware maintenance -- it'd be cheaper just to stockpile spares, then get the dead things repaired if they're under the 2 year hardware warranty.
From what people have been saying, even if I bought a contract, it probably wouldn't be honored anyway. :)
On the other hand, we've never tried calling 3Com, execpt when we had hardware die under warranty. The first was our very first Dual PRI (August 1997) that was DOA; they overnighted a new one. We had an NMC die later, which they spent a month repairing, but that's OK. I have a DSP that needs fixing now; we'll see how that goes... We've never called them for software support -- this mailing list mostly eliminates the need for that. For configuration stuff, I've usually been able to search around and figure it out myself. We've just about rewritten all of TCM (and soon HARM) in Perl anyway. :) We're sticking with it because from what I understand, despite all the problems people have with v.90, everyone else's stuff is worse. EVERY VENDOR has v.90 problems of SOME sort. Ascend has problems too, Cisco does, Livingston did... you'd just trade one set of problems for another. I also hate Ascend's management interface, and their, uh, "unique" ideas about how SNMP should work. Our competitors here use Ascend and Cisco (except AOL which is 3Com) and I'm *not* seeing a lot of people say they get more reliable connects there. There's only so much that can be done on the server to compensate for a broken client (Rockwell HCF)... Mike Andrews (MA12) * mandrews@dcr.net * http://www.bit0.com/ VP, sysadmin, & network guy, Digital Crescent Inc, Frankfort KY Internet services for Frankfort, Lawrenceburg, Owenton, Shelbyville "Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things." On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Jeff Mcadams wrote:
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
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