Re: Aftermarket switches that were manufactured in any sort of quantity?

[Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke () gmail com>]

With all due respect, without sharing NDA protected information about the
specific quantity and model numbers of FS switches I have personal
experience with in a certain network, there are very valid reasons to have
significant concerns about the stability and feature set of the operating
system that ships on them.

There is a *reason* they are abnormally cheap, in exactly the same way that
FS transceivers which are literally the cheapest 1Gbps and 10Gbps OOK
optics you can "Add to cart" and buy online are the cheapest transceivers
you can buy on the market.

But by all means please go ahead and use FS switches for all the layer 2
aggregation needs in your network if you think that they meet your needs.
I'm not stopping you.

If an ISP has a serious enough need for a large quantity of whitebox
switches based on known switch-chip vendors' ASICs I would encourage them
to send staff with experience in the electronics manufacturing industry to
every year's Computex Taipei and speak with the manufacturers in person.





On Thu, 9 Jun 2022 at 11:39, Saku Ytti <saku () ytti fi> wrote:

> On Thu, 9 Jun 2022 at 21:21, Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke () gmail com> wrote:
>
> > To paraphrase someone else, I would highly recommend that all my
> competition use Fiberstore switches. This is based on direct experience
> with them.
>
> Of course you're not telling anything at all here. I know plenty of
> very happy fs customers, and plenty of disappointed. And you can
> replace fs with anything at all, and it remains true. Nothing of value
> was said.
>
> Very few have statistically useful experience to share just about
> anything, just anecdotes, and every single company regularly has poor
> customer interactions. We regularly extrapolate a lot of information
> from a single anecdote. This is like old men discussing in petrol
> station which car brands are great and which suck, which is always
> near 0 signal information, if you start to apply any type of formality
> to it, like start looking at MOT statistics, you will find, yeah maybe
> there are some signals, maybe Toyota is good, but at the same time you
> will notice, well I can pick really bad Toyota, if I pick specific
> model + model year (next or previous model year of same model might be
> again great).
>
> I have more respect for your competitors' ability to procure than this.
>
> --
>   ++ytti