I'm referring to the _vendor's_ support costs - as in, you don't need as many people in the TAC if people don't keep running into IOS bugs; you don't need as large of a RMA pool if the hardware is more reliable, etc.
What percentage of TAC personnel's time is spent dealing with calls that ultimately result in a BugID? NANOG isn't representative; mostly, TAC exists to take calls from idiots who bought a box that they don't know how to configure. Large network operators have a staff of people to handle that, so when they call TAC, the box is probably broken. I don't think that's the case with the majority of TAC cases, though. I would imagine a lot once I got queued to the team that deals with the "I just bought an 803 from pc world" and good did it sound busy in the background. Yet when you ring for network down situations its like a dead calm in the background hmmm. Or how much time is spent telling you its a bug you can't see ? ;-). Regards, Kevin