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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Advice on dealing with Sprint
On Thu, 26 Sep 96 05:09 PDT, [email protected] writes: > >> Simple really. Sprint have a back-door deal with Cisco, either >> for money or favours (like getting bugs fixed :-) that means that >> they will only allow Cisco boxes to connect. > >First, careful readers of this forum would have noticed that the head of >SL Ops said right here that the restriction is non-op. > >Second, the reasons suppliers of service (in general, not just internet) >ask customers to standardize on CPE is that experience has taught us that >in 99% of the cases we are going to be dealing with the CPE. "Against our >wills, Papa! Against our wills!" > >The solution I recommend is for the provider to charge T&M for dealing >with CPE which they do not supply. When presented with the real costs, >consumers tend toward wiser decisions. I tend to agree. That's how we operate our business. We resell Bay Networks equipment to downstream customers. They are free to use whatever equipment they want, but official support is only provided for Bay routers which the customer buys from us. I say official because I have been known to fix a Cisco for a customer too. Most of their configurations are fairly simple - PPP and static routing. I would never expect Sprint, MCI, or whoever to support my router or diagnose problems with it. We have two people on staff to do that, and also pay a large chunk of money to Bay every year for a 24 hour support contract. I can understand Sprint's point of view, but they can easily just say "We absolutely 100% will not help you with configuration problems unless you use our equipment." That's perfectly acceptable to me. Sounds like that is in fact their official policy, but they have some internal communications problems. -Jon ----------------------------------------------------------------- * Jon Green * Wide-Area Networking Technician * * [email protected] * Iowa Network Services, Inc. * * Finger for Geek Code/PGP * 312 8th Street, Suite 730 * * #include "std_disclaimer.h" * Des Moines, IA 50309 * ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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