....and we're eagerly awaiting our recent order of PoE injectors.
On 8/3/2015 7:37 PM, Forrest Christian (List Account) wrote:
This is somewhat of a vent/rant, but also I will also take suggestions
on how to handle this issue.
Since I've been shipping gigabit injector products, I've struggled
with the pricing of the magnetics which are used to inject the power
on the cat5 cable. After a lot of time searching, I ended up using a
Pulse branded HX6096NL. This is a extended temperature range part
(-40C to +85C), and is rated for 720mA@57V per pair, continuous.
This is the least expensive part I've found so far which meets decent
current rating and temperature rating standards. If you're
interested, the datasheet is at:
http://productfinder.pulseeng.com/products/datasheets/HX6096FNL.pdf
Unfortunately, cheap is not cheap. These parts cost me around $4.25
in quantity, EACH. (See http://www.findchips.com/search/hx6096fnl ).
I could buy non-temperature rated parts for a bit less, but I don't
want to not ship an extended temperature-rated product. This means on
a 4 port injector, the parts costs alone to add gigabit are $21.00.
For a 12 port injector, this ends up being $61.00.
As a general rule of thumb, you need to multiply production costs by
about 2 or 2.5 to get the final sale price (and even at that I'm not
getting rich) (see
http://www.eevblog.com/2014/05/28/the-economics-of-selling-your-hardware-project/
to understand why*)* - so using these parts effectively adds $42 to
the price of a 4 port injector, and $122 to a 12 port injector, when
compared to a non-injected version.
The frustrating part of all of this is that I see competitors which
are selling products which are amazingly inexpensive. For instance,
I recently bought a 6 port gigabit injector for $37.95, hoping that
once I tore it apart, I'd find a source for an expensive magnetics. I
should note that just the magnetic costs for 6 of the magnetics that I
use are $25.50, leaving only $12.95 for everything else and profit.
So, what did I find inside? They're using a cheap cheap
questionable-quality knockoff of a set of magnetics which (even if
they were genuine) are not only not industrial temperature range (in
fairness they didn't claim this) but worse, they're not rated for PoE
at all - signal only, no DC. I would never in a million years consider
shipping a product with this set of magnetics in it, and I sure
wouldn't use this in my network. Yet somehow I have to compete with this.
I guess where I'm going with this is: I am starting to get pushback
about my pricing when compared to these low-cost options, and I'm sure
that they're making an impact into my bottom line - it's definitely
difficult to sell against a product which is so much less expensive,
as long as the perception is that the cheaper product isn't in any
material way less functional or meaningfully lower quality.
Unfortunately, the other option seems to be to start badmouthing the
competition, which isn't something I would ever stoop to.
I'm not quite sure how to address this. Any suggestions?
--
*Forrest Christian* /CEO//, PacketFlux Technologies, Inc./
Tel: 406-449-3345 | Address: 3577 Countryside Road, Helena, MT 59602
forre...@imach.com <mailto:forre...@imach.com> |
http://www.packetflux.com <http://www.packetflux.com/>
<http://www.linkedin.com/in/fwchristian>
<http://facebook.com/packetflux> <http://twitter.com/@packetflux>
