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Very
True!! One "Aw-Shit" wipes out all of your
"Atta-Boys"!!!
Scott
Dear Nish,
The content of your letter increases my
concern about the quality and reliability of the SB product line as well as
where the company and the outdoor product line is headed in the next year. The
statistics you quote only add to this concern as they are not detailed enough
to draw any conclusions from. I believe your marketing plan is to sell into
the WISP market. If so, the WISP’s that stay in business over the next year
(many won’t) need outdoor equipment for their infrastructure that is more
reliable than we here at Airwave Internet have been seeing coming from SB in
the last three months.
I look forward to your ‘comprehensive
info package’. In the meantime my comments to your post are presented
below:
- The facts are the failure rate of
APPO’s and ABO’s in recent months is unacceptable for running a WISP and
will contribute to the failure rate of the WISP’s themselves. There is no
room for interpretation here no matter what your worldwide numbers are
telling you.
- If it’s true that 40% of RMA’s are
‘good units’, this is troublesome. What motivates a customer to RMA a unit?
If they are anything like us, we are short on time, short on money, short on
manpower . . . . and we open the box pull out the unit, configure it in the
shop, perform a quick test to make sure it’s not DOA and head out for the
install. Later if the customer can’t connect or if one of our AP’s go down,
we go out, usually on a very hot or very cold roof, with the skeptical
customer eyeing our every move and try and determine what could be wrong
(any one of a hundred things, usually). So, we try to log into the unit and
try to get to the root cause. After one or two hours of screwing around,
which is not uncommon due to the finicky nature of radios that are flaky, we
can only conclude the unit has a problem and we RMA it. When SB gets these
RMA’s back and puts them on the bench and finds 40% of them ‘fine’ it makes
me very skeptical of SB’s testing process. Granted, some percentage of units
working perfectly well will always get RMA’ed. But I would think that number
should be less than 5%, not 40% as you have stated. To properly test RMA’ed
units that appear to be fine you’d have to install and mount them out in the
environment and then log them for a period of time. I doubt you do that.
- As for your comments about ‘negative
sentiments’, given human nature we can always expect emotion to be a factor.
Also, ‘piling on’ is another thing to watch for. However, in regards to the
“Dead Ethernet” problem, “Flaky Firmware” problem, and the “Early Failure”
problem, and other problems I am not aware of, I would guess in excess of
90% of the posts I’ve read are written by reasonable people just trying to
get a job done and their equipment is letting them down. As for your comment
about the lack of follow up posts, in my case I can tell you that my
instincts and experience tell me that the talk is just that, talk and that
more talk isn’t going to make things better so maybe some of us SB customers
are just plain tired at this point….maybe too tired and too discouraged to
continue to pursue the ‘talking’. What SB needs to do is make the outdoor
units reliable. Does a $280 SB unit need to be as reliable as a $1,200 unit
from another manufacturer? No, but half as reliable would be
nice.
- As for your support staff ‘working with
us to resolve the issue’ . . . great but we know reliability is built
in, not added later.
In regards to the statistics you
state:
- RMA rate is 3% (1.8% effective)
overall.
- What are the RMA rates by product? by
month? by USA region? How have the RMA rates changed since the
APPO’s and ABO’s first hit the streets? Perhaps your comprehensive report
will contain this. Personally I don’t care…..I just want more reliable
equipment. Charge us more if you have to.
- You state your manufacturing defect
rate is less than .01%.
- Is that correct? So, one unit in a
thousand off the assembly line is defective? But the actual RMA rate is
1.8%. And you are asking US why? Could it be early failure? Could it be your
QA process? You tell us.
So, in summary thank you for your time.
Keep trying, and remember, all we want is more reliable outdoor units.
Regards,
Bobby Bounds
Airwave Internet, LLC
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
505-867-2413
-----Original
Message-----
From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Behalf Of Nish Park
Sent: Thursday, June 19,
2003
3:30
AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [smartBridges] Quality
Control
In the last few days a lot
of forum bandwidth has been spent on the perceived quality issues with our
products. We are preparing a comprehensive info package to address these
comments. In the mean time here is some info.
1) Our macro level
(worldwide and over past 5 months) RMA rate is about 3%. About 40% of these
RMA do not have any problems. So the effective rate is about 1.8%. We have
comprehensive process in place to monitor this and continually improve this
further. Our goal is to reach under 1% over next few weeks (more details on
the process will be shared later).
2) From the nature of the forums
(this as well as others), we have come to realize that it is lot easier for
negative sentiments to linger around. In general, when people have some
problem, they post a message. Our support staff would work with them to
resolve the issue. But it is rare that a follow-up post would be made
clarifying the issue.
3) Many times we see posts that do not appear to
be genuine problem statements. When we reach out and try to work with those
individuals, they do not reply. Unfortunately this happens often
enough.
4) The product shortage and availability issues had contributed
to adding to the frustration level. But by now enough shipments should be
reaching the distributors to take care of ALL the back orders. In addition,
new distributors have been appointed to provide you alternatives.
5)
We are going through the growing pains (like 100% month over month) but please
be assured that our focus on quality is unwavering.
6) Here is an issue we are
trying to figure out. Any thoughts would be appreciated. The outgoing quality
level from the factory is better than 99.9x%. Field return rate is 3%
(or 1.8%). So what could happen in between that some people experience real
bad things?
Nish
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