[TriLUG] Xmas wireless question

[Jim Ray]

well, i have a confession.  one of my oldest customers, delta dental plan of
nc, has cisco infrastructure throughout and has operated flawlessly since
our initial installation in 1998.  there's a big difference in cisco 924 and
2500, 2600, 3000 and 5000 series products.

my largest customer, tekni-plex, has some 21 plants in many different
countries.  they are a fool to cancel the local 1.5 Mbps time warner
roadrunner internet connection and pipe all as/400, smtp and http traffic
across a 64 kbps frac t1 even if the cisco 924 is trash.  there is nothing
wrong with having high quality wan connections with backup for something
like a mission-critical as/400.

my newest customer enjoys saving lots of money with their cable modem and el
cheapo router.  they do not depend on any connection at all to conduct their
business.

i'll take a cable modem and $60 linksys router any day of the week for the
Internet connection.  one may quickly determine the cost/bandwidth ratio and
uptime statistics to assist in deciding what topology is appropriate.

i surely wouldn't want my business revolving around an Internet connection,
though...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dan Monjar [mailto:daniel.monjar at na.biomerieux.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 10:00 AM
> To: Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list; Jim Ray
> Subject: RE: Re[2]: [TriLUG] Xmas wireless question
>
>
> --On Tuesday, December 30, 2003 07:43:38 PM -0500 Jim Ray
> <jim at neuse.net>
> wrote:
>
> > 0's and 1's don't differentiate biz/home or brand.  before
> corporate out
> > of nj laid down the law on their motorola router and frac
> t1 at my largest
> > client, i had roadrunner biz class service at that site with fancy
> > schamncy cisco 924 router.  it puked *3* times over 2 years while my
> > residential roadrunner connection with motorola cable modem
> and linksys
> > router kept on ticking.
> >
> > too bad corporate pays ten times as much and gets ten times less
> > bandwidth. ah, the price of control.
> >
> > Mbps, IP, DNS and cost are all that matter.  everything
> else can just go
> > home and is pure marketing fluff.
>
> It all depends on where you stand... I'm responsible for a
> North American
> network spanning 6 sites that supports over 1600 end users.
> I've used
> Cisco at my core and at the edges for close to 10 years now.
> Out of 20 or
> so key devices I can remember one or two instances of
> 'puking' in that
> time.  At that, they were just power supplies and the
> redundant PS kept me
> online while I hot-swapped the bad one.
>
> Sure, I might pay $2000 for a router that you would choose to
> spend $200
> on... but if one of my manufacturing sites goes down for a
> substantial
> amount of time, and I am speaking in terms of hours, the lose
> could easily
> be in the hundred's of thousand's of dollars.  This is both
> in terms of
> lost production capacity and   of people sitting on their
> hands because
> they can't get to their applications.
>
> Equipment cost is a very small part of the equation...
>
> --
> Daniel Monjar
> IS Manager, Technical Services
> bioMérieux, Inc.
> Durham, NC US