On Sun, 17 Oct 1999, Jason A. Nunnelley wrote:
What you can count on is Churn. If customers leave you - you can see the difference. I have lost fewer customers with connection issues with 3COM than Livingston (with the PM3 that is). I have never had a connection issue with the PM2e30 (analog). It is 100%!
So, what should I use when my 3COM contract runs out? Any sugestions? I guess everyone considers 3COM a loser when it comes to support. Yet, the largest ISPs use it. Why? M$pring, MCI, etc.
In its heyday, one could say the AOL(ans), mindspring, earthlink(?) used TC's........but companies do switch sometimes, and alot now run Ascend gear. worldcom i know is ascend, and I believe AOL is moving in more ascend. AOL always had ascend to do their kflex stuff. But this is a good point, who are the large guys and what are they using today? Can anyone help fill in the chart? AOL 3com/ascend (percentages?) splitrock(prodigy) Bay Worldcom(uunet) Ascend Mindspring 3com Cybergate 3com anyone know abou the other big players?
Why?
-----Original Message----- From: owner-usr-tc@lists.xmission.com [mailto:owner-usr-tc@lists.xmission.com]On Behalf Of Lon R. Stockton, Jr. Sent: Sunday, October 17, 1999 3:52 PM To: usr-tc@lists.xmission.com Subject: Re: (usr-tc) 3com V90 Problems
On Sun, 17 Oct 1999, Brian wrote:
What I am getting at, is raw data and numbers are the best, rather than the more subjective data of customers opinions about their connections.
No doubt about that; I've seen the stuff you mentioned happening...one can't really read *too* much into customer complaints (or praises) except a feeling of customer satisfaction. But if a customer is unsatisfied for the wrong (or misunderstood) reasons, the question is where you want to stand on it.
For example...I had a 3rd party actively test us vs. our competition WRT dialup connect speeds/xfer rates. The downside is that they found that for most client-side modems, our initial connect speed was lower than the competition. Funny thing was, in many cases, the competition's higher initial speed would get retrained down....while ours either remained the same or retrained up.
The other huge point that was found was that we had faster overall xfer rates, even with our lower connect speeds. This point was pursued further, and it was found that a 33.6k connection thru us gave faster xfer rates than our competitors' 43-46k rates! Rather interesting what a solid connection with no retransmits can do up against a shaky, albeit faster, connection with a bunch of retransmits.
The above results made me feel good, but there's still the question of what to do about it. The only thing the average customer sees is the initial connect speed, and in the majority of cases, it's quite useless to start telling them about retraining, retransmits, and how the real measure is xfer rate anyway. Most just think you're shooting them a load of bull, trying to swamp them with computer-talk to cover yourself.
Me, I give it a shot anyway...if they understand, great, if not, oh well, they're not really my target customer anyway. That may sound like the age-old 'sour grapes' attitude, but know that I'm not in biz to get the biggest part of the market...I'm here to skim the cream and garner the best customers. When you're targeting power-users and businesses, you wind up with people who understand more of the details.
But much harder if your target is the average joe, my guess would be to switch to whatever platform gave you the highest initial connect so that all the ones who guage everything by their initial speed will be happy. Or plunge into the murky deep and switch their connect speed reporting to the DTE rate so they can be amazed at your super 115k connects. (:
But as your message said, it's hard to trust customer appraisals of your speeds. If you want to know the scoop, get a 3rd party who a) knows what they're doing, and b) has no interest in the outcome to run tests and report back.
PS. No probs here with 3com client modem connections that I can tell. But then again, I don't have any Ascends to compare to. This is with the following:
HARC: h/w ver. 1.0.0 s/w ver. 4.0.30 HDSP: h/w ver. 0.49.0 s/w ver. 1.2.5
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----------------------------------------------------- Brian Feeny (BF304) signal@shreve.net 318-222-2638 x 109 http://www.shreve.net/~signal Network Administrator ShreveNet Inc. (ASN 11881) - 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.