I can chime in on the PATTON products. First, my experience with the company was excellent. I've never met a company that bent over backwards so much to please their customers. There isn't a ranking high enough for them. Top marks. Second, the product. The 29xx are designed for the dialup ISP and as such are affordable, reliable and simple. Setup was a snap - we had our first unit answering calls in 10 minutes, literally. Reliability, we ran the Patton box for 87 days and had a 96% connection success over those 87 days without a reboot or problem of any kind. Considering we were replacing a 'reboot every three days' Equinox product, we were thrilled with it. And affordability, for ~5-10,000 new for 48 to 96 ports, the price is really fair. And support, it's simply free. Free software, free phone, free email. It's built into the product. We ended up not keeping the Patton because of no MPPC or STAC compression and because the V.92 code was slow in coming. I know it's not slow compared to some, but they were advertising in December to buy their V.92 RAS, but at present it's still Beta. The lack of built in MPPC compression made web-browsing much slower than our Equinox connected customers were used to, and Patton also had no immediate plans to address that. These two things, unfortunately, made the Patton RAS unworkable for us on a technical point, but on reliability - affordability and support, I give them as high marks as possible. The only bad (and in my opinion unfair) rap they have is a recent decision to lower the price and remove the cross-ship warranty. They reasoned that not everyone wants or needs a cross-ship warranty, so they lowered the price a bit and now offer a depot warranty. If you want or need cross ship for some problem, you have the option of paying ~$700 at that time. Of course, some people spin this into a rip off, but personally, I'd rather save my $700 and only spend it if I need it. Before, they units were always more expensive and then if you needed the cross-ship warranty, it was already pre-paid. Todd Chamberlain support@inet2000.com ----- Original Message ----- EDITED FOR BREVITY From: "Jeff Mcadams" <jeffm@iglou.com> Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2002 7:53 AM
$2500 a year for software upgrades is highway robbery. I will also research Patton to find ISP's luck with connections and reliability. -- Jeff McAdams Email: jeffm@iglou.com Head Network Administrator Voice: (502) 966-3848 IgLou Internet Services (800) 436-4456
_______________________________________________ USR-TC mailing list USR-TC@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/usr-tc