I would include the temperature and current specs prominently in your marketing literature / spec sheets. Let the other guys lack of such specs speak for itself.
From: Forrest Christian (List Account) Sent: Monday, August 03, 2015 6:37 PM To: af Subject: [AFMUG] Competitor parts quality. 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 | http://www.packetflux.com
