Ascend Archive
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(ASCEND) Re: What is carrier-class?
At 12:17 PM 11/8/97 +1300, Josh Bailey wrote:
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
>On Fri, 7 Nov 1997, Wade Williams wrote:
>
>> To expect a TAC engineer to spend time on the phone calling around
>> bothering customers asking them to spend their time and effort to support
>> another of our customers with no relation to them, is at best, unrealistic.
>
>I wasn't expecting that.
>
>I *was* expecting Cisco to have people out there running 7513s in my sort
>of configuration with a long uptime.
>
>Does that mean Cisco bases its stability knowledge on how many people ring
>in to complain? Don't you get feedback from your resellers and gold
>partners? Or don't you listen to it?
>
>...Shades of Ascend here...
>
>Is *anyone* out there carrier class?
Josh,
I'm continuing this discussion to the list because I think it's important
for us (and it sounds like Ascend too) to understand your definition of
"carrier-class." Several people have also responded, so I think it's of
interest to others too.
Please define for me what you mean by carrier-class?
I think we may be seeing a problem of scale here. That is to say, Lucent,
Northern Telecomm, etc, certainly have sold a lot of phone switches, but
the list of 5ESS owners is probably not that large. Probably measured in
the thousands, if not less. They can hire 1 or 2 people to keep up with
what code version each customer is running, their satisfaction with the
switch, etc.
Companies like Cisco and Ascend on the otherhand measure customers in the
tens-of-thousands, or hundreds-of-thousands or millions. To add to that
problem, there's the problem of the many configurations. Do you want us to
keep track of problems on 7513's with IP software? How about DLSw? How
about DLSw with a FDDI card? Or what if that FDDI card is actually a VIP
PA? What if that VIP PA is hardware rev 2? How does that interact with
microcode 2.1? Etc, etc.
Before we release a maintenance release, we test the software and have it
code reviewed by another programmer. What should we be doing differently
that we can realistically do?
What is it that a carrier-class vendor does for you that Cisco does not?
I certainly understand that Cisco is not perfect, and I'd like to
understand how you think we (or Ascend) can improve things to what you call
carrier-class. If you can give me some feedback on that, I'll take it back
to some of the guys at TAC to pass to the powers that be.
Wade
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wade Williams "And the trees are all kept equal by
Systems Engineer hatchet, axe, and saw."
Cisco Systems, Inc. - N. Peart
Brentwood, TN
615-221-2918
wwilliam@cisco.com
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