We have tens of thousands of Netopia's in service for our T-1, SDSL and ADSL customers. Netopia has been a great company to work with. Their devices are fairly feature packed for what is needed on an edge device. They are missing advanced routing such as OSPF and BGP, however. The devices are either driven by an easy to use menu system or you can hit ctrl-n and jump to the CLI. If the unit is under warranty, then getting a replacement for a failed unit should not be an issue. I can't say what our failure rate has been, but I can say that with all of the options out there (cisco, efficient, etc), if they had been a problem, we would not still be shipping them. -Sean Sean Crandall VP Engineering Operations MegaPath Networks Inc. 6691 Owens Drive Pleasanton, CA 94588 (925) 201-2530 (office) (925) 201-2550 (fax)

-----Original Message----- From: Scott McGrath [mailto:mcgrath@fas.harvard.edu]

Have you tried a softnet depot maintenance agreement. This entitles you to IOS upgrades but H/W replacement is some negotiated percentage of list price.

The other guys _may_ be cheaper in the short run but hardware replacement is always like having a root canal cant speak for Netopia but I have dealt with Adtran ended up buying a spare DS3 CSU/DSU because of the experience.

Cisco has many warts but they do honor their maintenance contracts unlike some other vendors who I have had the misfortune of dealing with.

Scott C. McGrath

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, Claydon, Tom wrote:

...

Hello,

We're looking for a good replacement for fractional T1 customers with Cisco 1600- & 1700-series routers as their CPE. They are good routers, but the ongoing support costs are an issue, and we need to replace them ASAP.

Someone had mentioned several CPE vendors, such as Adtran and Netopia. Are there any others, and does anyone have any pros/cons of what they're familiar with?

Thanks,

= TC

-- Tom Claydon, IT/ATM Network Engineer Dobson Telephone Company phone: (405) 391-8201 cell: (405) 834-0341