Ah, how did you deploy the equipment at the 600 locations that your having problems with, then? Are all 600 locations unmanned? Do you personally have to fly out to each location if there is a problem? Is your failure rate so low that none of these lcations ever have breakdowns that require someone at the site with technical knowledge to get them running again? Come on be honest, this is a lame excuse. $100K and 6 months time with an intern would probably take care of it.

I wish you luck - it sounds to me like you are searching for a way to force one of the vendors to write some sort of software patch that will magically fix the problem. I don't think that will be possible, because I don't think with this kind of problem that a software patch can be written to fix it.

Neither of these vendors actually built the ethernet controller chips that they are using. They just buy them from the lowest bidder (usually) and they could care less about them as long as they work. And since working is usually defined by plugging it into a hub, it is very unlikely a problem like this would show up in testing.

These problems are chip-level problems and aren't generally solved by code changes. And unless your a mammoth large customer of one of the vendors devices even if a firmware change would fix it, it's going to probably break it for everyone else, and the vendor is going to drag their feet on doing anything about it.

Not to mention that by now both vendors of the offending hardware have probably been told by their own engineers that a $50 hub will fix the problem, so they know that this problem of yours will go away by itself if they just stall you long enough.

With all due respect I think that you have got carried away by the fact that you have 600 devices in the field and you are starting to think that this is so many devices that the vendors are actually going to pay attention to you. How many devices do you think Cisco sells a year? It must be in the hundred thousands.

You might have some leverage if your PLANNING on deploying 600 nodes. But it sounds like you already spent the money on both devices and have found out about the problem after the fact. In that case it would be well to remember the Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #1.

You always have the option to move to something else. What people often lack is the money to move to something else. I presume what your really saying is that you don't have the money to move to something else. And pardon me but is this YOUR money? I suspect not - so the actual reality is that what your really saying is that the people that own your company don't have the money to move to something else.

Beating a vendor into submission on something like this is going to take a long time. Can you afford 2-3 months of back and forth baloney with the vendor? Remember even if you prove with the help of God Himself that one of the devices is not in compliance, if the vendor decides it's not worth fixing to them, all you can do is sue them, and by the time you will get any kind of settlement, it's going to be 2 years from now and your competitors will have long since left you in the dust.

So one has to

Heh. Well, welcome to my world. :-)

If your getting lack of support from the vendors there's a reason for it. Unless they are total a-holes, and most vendors aren't, a vendor will make easy changes to accomodate customers. The ticklish part is when you are trying to make the vendor make hard changes. These changes cost the vendors serious coin, and my experience is that most vendors are simply not going to spend the money on fixing them, and will instead work up new and creative ways to excuse themselves.

Maybe if you could tell us the exact devices involved someone here might have run across this already? Is there some reason that these devices so far have remained black boxes?

Ted