On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Clint R. Sparks wrote:
Paul, I am not trying to disagree with you here and I agree 3 Com needs to wake up sometimes on how they treat customers. However Ascend/Lucent is going to eventually charge for support contracts, it will be no different when they do. All equipment manufacturers see this as a great source of income and they are all in it for the money so it is only a matter of time before all charge for it.
I just got a Cisco AS53192 to replace most of my 3Com gear. (I always maintain two types of NAS equipment for compatability reasons.) The pricing on the 8x5xNBD contract is $2730 per year. I think the 3Com price on a similiar contract is the same or more for 192 ports. Cisco will normally provide 24x7 support at no additional cost for network down emergencies even with the 8x5 contract. I'm pretty sure 3Com would charge the normal hourly or per incident charge for after hours calls. The 24x7x4 contract that includes 4 hour replacement is $4370 a year. Might seem a bit steep, but I don't think 3Com even offers 4 hour replacement. I can't afford to have 192 of my lines out of service oevernight or through a weekend. One long outage would probably wipe out any savings gained by not paying for the support. Brian - 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.