3com to Compete with Cisco 181
RNelson writes "3com has announced its new lines of routers poised to compete with Cisco. 'The company claims that these routers will cost 30 percent to 50 percent less than similar offerings from market leader Cisco.' The new routers compete the Cisco's 3725, 3745, and 83xx routers."
Re:3COM (Score:4, Informative)
I've always sworn by their network cards... they're always the first name I turn to.
Re:Cisco should be scared (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cisco should be scared (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Interesting move for 3Com... (Score:3, Informative)
Info about the suit [theregister.co.uk]
Info about the settlement [theregister.co.uk]
Re:Heh (Score:3, Informative)
From URL:http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2004/prod_0914
New features appear to include a higher and easier integration of VoIP/IPT and security and a new WIC interface with higher speeds (1000FX WIC, for instance).
Re:30-50% less? (Score:4, Informative)
Faster Better Cheaper, pick two.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:30-50% less? (Score:0, Informative)
You had Cisco Smartnet, they don't advanced replace for warranty period without a contract.
Guess what? Neither does 3com.
If you would have purchased 3com's maintenance contract, http://www.3com.com/products/en_US/detail.jsp?tab
3Com's history (Score:5, Informative)
Two months after my installation was complete, 3Com EXITED the market. Yes - they immediately discontinued ALL of the brand new gear that we had just purchased. No notice. On a Monday morning, it was in the papers.
They botched their rep ALL over the place. I doubt I'd touch their new gear with a 10 foot pole. They're one of the flakiest companies I've ever had the misfortune to work with. Good gear, but absolutely horrid management.
Atrocious quality (Score:3, Informative)
My first experience was a 10-pack of 3com network cards about 8 years back: Some were fast, some were slow, some produced so many bugs that the router (Cisco) disabled the interface. These were cards with consecutive serial numbers! My explanation is very poor Q/A on the cards. I never have had this type of problems with any cheack RTL8xxx card from Taiwan.
The second experience was an unusable "Office" switch, that had a noisy and very poorly designed switching regulator in it. That was 1 year back. The switch finally died becayse they also had cut the leads of the power semiconductor too long and in short-circuited. I declined a replacement, since it also ran so hot, that it would have dies in a few months anyway. I have now a far cheaprt router by Netgear, with no such problems and overall far more solid design and manufacturing. And cheaper as well.
Re:30-50% less? (Score:3, Informative)
It's a standard power cable with a notch cut above it.
I think we can easily pull together a dozen or so more odd things cisco does to rape their customers.
Soon we can say, No one ever got fired for buying Cisco!
3com? Boo! (Score:5, Informative)
Also, where I used to work they bought a 3com RAS solution. The CLI was pretty bad compared to my favorite at the time, Livingston Portmasters. It was overpriced, and just seemed like a botched design with the CPU in one box and a $2000 add on with 4 modems in it.
Some people seem to have a thing for 3com. I think it is mostly the people that used their cards when 3com was the major player. Their earlier switches do seem rugged, but I'd probably look to SMC Tigerswitch (owned by Enterasys now?) before 3com for a SOHO deployment. I'm odd, even for SOHO I like managed switches and rackmount. And metal boxes, I dig NetGears form factors. PS, is NetGear still tied to Bay? Bay was sold to Nortel, Netgear used to be Bay Networks. Is Netgear Notel or the existing Bay Networks? Confusion.
I'd imagine it is management that plauges 3com. They announced the end of all high end products a while ago, since Cisco's market share was owning them (and others like Riverstone, Extreme, Enterasys, Foundry). They wanted to concentrate on their NICs (one word, intel Pro 10/100) and little baby network devices.
Cisco dominates the market. I own a few pieces of Cisco gear, ALOT of Cabletron/Enterasys surplus and many of the smaller vendors. Cisco gear is indeed nice, I like it but there is a premium to be paid (unless your like me and buy from eBay, a practice Cisco tried unsuccessfully to stop).
There have been alot of small players that might have competed but the major players buy them up. Prominet got bought by Lucent, their products became the Cajun family (and Intel resold some of their stuff). There are others (ELS series from Cabletron was a smaller company that got bought out). You can see it when you dig thru the firmware binaries
I only take my routers three ways... (Score:3, Informative)
Free [freesco.org]
Secure [openbsd.org]
Any combination of the above three.
My 3com experience (Score:2, Informative)
Where I really draw experience from 3com is their switches and routers, neither of which I'll ever use again.
Scenario:
1 x 7513 connected to a switch via a PA-2FE on a VIP2-50
1 x 3com 24 port switch connected to the cisco router and connected to
8x Acend Max TNT's each with 672 DS0's and 1xFE.
Two observations:
First, the switch wasn't nearly as configurable as the competing cisco switch (2924xl). It had a neat web interface with java applets but in general its software configuration was limited, and its cli sucked.
Second, under no load the switch was fine. However, under the heavy load of 5376 dialup users sharing a 100 megabit connection the switch had serious packet problems, or lack of packets since it dropped most of them. It couldn't do the packets per second that the 2924 could, even if under no load the throughput was reasonable.
In general the switch from 3com, which wasn't much cheaper than the cisco switch performed terribly.
Second scenario:
1 x adtran TSU
1 x 3com t1 (well, v35) router
I had to configure this piece of junk for a customer and I have to say that its CLI is the worst I have ever worked with. Yeah, its even worse than the xedia CLI for those who have also been unfortunate enough to work with those boxes. What should have taken minutes, and would have with a well thought out CLI took hours.
In short, 3com don't even get into the business. Stay in the consumer sector where people don't have a clue - because I and anyone else who has really put your "enterprise" products to the test already know to stay away from you - we won't be buying. You burned us once, then instead of making things right and fixing your software issues, you exited the market leaving us high and dry.
Cisco Equipment (Score:2, Informative)
I would consider Juniper or Foundry equipment for certain applications, but not without demo hardware first to see how they integrated into our stricly Cisco network. VLAN trunking, spanning-tree, etc can differ immensly from one vendor to the next. Sometimes even the same vendor but different models do not interoperate quit the way one would expect.
In any case, if you are on the fence with either Cisco or 3Com, I'd tell you Cisco. We have lots of Layer 2 switches that they replace overnight with no issues. I've had Cisco send me exact replicas of routers in less than 4 hours (courier service), complete with memory and flash to test problems with integration. They really do offer top notch customer support and service.
Things I do not like about Cisco. If you buy hardware used from anyone but Cisco, it has to be recertified by Cisco Engineers before you can put it on Cisco maintenance. Sounds logical? Sure, until you see to recertify hardware is about the same price as getting some newer, faster, and more featured. I go through a nightmare every year when it comes time to renew our maintenance contract. I won't go into details, but it seems their database for this information is very cumbersome for the reps. They lack SSH as a standard connection option. Without certain IOSes this feature is not available at all. I wish they would change this.
3Com tried this before. (Score:5, Informative)
I love it when bean counters decide that years of end-user pain and agony is worth $500 or $1000 savings on a cheap piece of hardware.
I've installed, maintained, configured, and troubleshooted hundreds of routers over the past 10 years. Hardware costs are not the only thing to consider. If you think saving 30%-50% in hardware costs is great, how about spending 200% more in labor costs, year after year? How about outfitting your NOC with an expensive new monitoring package exclusively designed for your new hardware? How about facing growth limits? How about watching your network go from 99.9999% uptime to something less?
What do you tell your customer/client base? "We're saving $1000 per router. I'm sorry that you'll have to live with ______ and ______ for the next few years." What is that worth to you? When there is trouble, listen to the vendors bicker over the reason(s). What is it worth to wait 1 year or more for a bug fix? And then discover that in order to get that bug fix, you might have to buy new hardware?
People don't realize what's involved in building a network. Reliability, room-for-growth, and features are everything. There are problems in every network. Giving your users a productive, working environment is the ultimate goal. Gambling with new hardware is not something I'd like to do very often.
I can guarantee this: I'll pay double for a reliable piece of hardware that does EXACTLY what I want, all the time when I know that the other end is the same brand of hardware. Plus, the carrier in between is using the same hardware. Plus, it's been lab tested by everyone. It gets better: One phone call and all my problems and answers are readily available. Every one of those things saves time and money. User experience is more positive because features are better, and there isn't any finger pointing between hardware vendors. I don't have to spend money buying multiple hardware platforms to labtest. I don't have to worry about mixed-vendor networks. Have you ever installed a mixed-vendor network? It's one of the most painful experiences you could ever have. I would put it right up there with kidney stones, and having fingernails forcibly removed with a pair of pliers.
Bean counters that want cheap hardware are usually going to pay increased labor costs. They will have workarounds and painful experiences for their end-users. It's NOT WORTH IT! If you want 99.9999% uptime, error-free performance, buy the best product available.
Cheap hardware is almost always feature-less, inflexible, and painful to live with. How many people remember 3Com's last go-around with routers? Easy to configure, but limited flexibility, and lacking features makes it harder to live with in the long run. Oh, and darn near impossible to troubleshoot. We had to outfit all of our technicians with $100K protocol analyzers to prove the trouble to cheap 3Com (and other) hardware because of the finger-pointing.
Look at it another way: If you're buying a Cadillac for the home office, why would you buy a Ford Pinto for the remote offices? It doesn't make sense. If you were building a space shuttle... are you going to use the cheapest hardware? Why would you do that with your network? There's a reason why Cisco has 90% of the market. Cisco has the most features. Everything hinges on software. While there are bugs in software, Cisco OS is fantastic. Features like EIGRP and HSRP make Cisco worthwhile. Interoperability with Cisco's LAN equipment make it worthwhile. Also, think about training, grey market materials, and used goods. Cisco is out there, commonly available. If you pick 3Com access routers, you've got to hire/train people to handle a new brand of unknown hardware. Training is expensive. And if your best-trained expert leaves, you've got to go find someone else. Finding Cisco people is easier.
People talk about Juniper. Juniper excels at one specific niche. The big, big router... basically IP to OC48 stuff. How many of those do you need? Juniper talks about the "pepsi challenge", but frankly, they'll have to go over and above Cisco to win my vote. There are other products, but you still end up with a mixed-vendor network.
New Cisco Routers (Score:1, Informative)
But: 3Com wants to compete with the 3725 & 3745? Fine with us. We just announced a bunch of new routers:
http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2004/prod_091404.h
Re:I won't trust them again. (Score:3, Informative)
The 3Com CMTS 1000 system based off the TotalControl (which was a USR platform anyways) chassis, was DOCSIS 1.0 , so much do CableLabs chose it as the standard platform for DOCSIS testbed.
The earlier platform wasn't DOCSIS, then again before y2k neither were many popular CMTS systems (Terayon's CDMA)
http://www.3com.com/corpinfo/en_US/pressbox/pre