Then, Tania, I would say that if the price is equipment dependant, don't blame the labs. They are only performing the tests asked of them.
Our equipment, by itself is well over $25,000.00 (they cost at least a quarter of a 'mil). I don't think that if we went back 10 years the price we pay now for testing would be much lower, when adding the costs of equipment. Bandele Jetstream Communications, Inc. [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: Grant, Tania (Tania) [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2000 12:42 PM To: 'Doug'; ; 'Bandele Adepoju' Subject: RE: EMC, NEBS & NRTL's Bandele, Testing to Bellcore requirements can be quite expensive when your are burning a whole cabinet of expensive OEM stuff, especially if you are burning it twice because the first test failed! Thus, the cost is not just what you pay the lab for running the test, but the cost is also equipment going up in smoke. Tania Grant, [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Lucent Technologies, Communications Applications Group ---------- From: Bandele Adepoju [SMTP:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, March 20, 2000 9:51 PM To: 'Doug'; [email protected] Subject: RE: EMC, NEBS & NRTL's Doug, telling your customers that your product was "UL approved" when in fact it was approved by a Lab other than UL would have been a hard sell - in any period. I wouldn't have bought that story myself, and your arguing in support of it would have just irritated me much more. You should have told your customers that your product was "safety approved" to a UL standard. ps, I wonder at what test lab those companies paying over $160,000.00 are doing their testing? Poor souls! Bandele Jetstream Communications, Inc. [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: Doug [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2000 12:34 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: EMC, NEBS & NRTL's I have a little experience with this interpretation by RBOCs having worked with contracts and compliance testing as the compliance guy of a former company. There's certainly people here with more experience and history with this stuff than I. The change began somewhere around 1995-96. I had a small lab in the engineering department where I personally did some of the more simple tests for Bellcore. Specifically the RBOCs I worked with were Ameritech, NYNEX, Southern Bell, Pac Bell ... I had someone on the qualification survey team from these places come in and witness the testing I did. All was fine back then with accepting FCC Class A and UL 1950 for Bellcore requirements. I could estimate UL-1950, FCC Class A, EN60950, EN55022A, EN50082 ... and the agreed upon Bellcore stuff (we negotiated that) all could be done for $25,000 for one product. The Bellcore results I wrote up myself as deliverables for the RBOC. < I'll wait until you guys stop laughing. > Two problems arose. One was having UL testing performed by an NRTL that was not UL. Thus, with some customers, it was unfathomable that a piece of equipment could be UL approved, NOT have been tested at UL, and NOT have the classic UL label showing compliance. I always ran into this where ever I went. Second, a change occurred whereby some of the RBOCs got scammed or whatever (so I was told). This lead to testing such as safety, environmental, shake testing, flame spread ... to be done *** AT *** important word there at, an NRTL. A lab that had some sort of national accreditation, i.e. reputation. In other words, in scanning the test results, the customer could see that the testing was done at some maybe famous lab, and well ... then it was in like flint. FCC testing was still separate from an NRTL lab. I threw many wrenches back then about this. Some of those wrenches landed on this newsgroup. Anywho, I estimated that such testing off site would raise from $25,000 to well over $100,000. This would impact my budget, it would bleed over into cost for the product and thus would obviously end up with increased costs to the customers (RBOCs) and finally, the increased costs would settle right in their customers laps - i.e. you and me. The heck with arguing about raising minimum wages. We're talking increasing the overhead on developing a product by a factor of times 4 overnight! I may as well have been a chickadee blowing flowers in a hurricane with that one, scuse my language. I'm hearing that those same type of products on which I used to spend only $25,000 to get through compliance now costs somewhere on the order of $160,000. And you as the mfr of that equipment are totally out of the loop during the testing. No more customizing some part of some test for a customer by way of a phone call and doing the test before running off to lunch. Anywho, at that time there were some really good people at the RBOCs. People who really knew their stuff when it came to compliance and Bellcore. And I could actually negotiate with them various parts of the Bellcore tests to do. They're almost gone now. And I fear some marketing contract reviewer with a business degree is the only person at some RBOC who checks off required testing deliverables. And things like "NRTL" and "Class A" don't mean a hoot to them ... Sorry for the length. Regards, Doug McKean ------------------------------------------- This message is from the IEEE EMC Society Product Safety Technical Committee emc-pstc discussion list. To cancel your subscription, send mail to: [email protected] with the single line: unsubscribe emc-pstc For help, send mail to the list administrators: Jim Bacher: [email protected] Michael Garretson: [email protected] For policy questions, send mail to: Richard Nute: [email protected] ------------------------------------------- This message is from the IEEE EMC Society Product Safety Technical Committee emc-pstc discussion list. To cancel your subscription, send mail to: [email protected] with the single line: unsubscribe emc-pstc For help, send mail to the list administrators: Jim Bacher: [email protected] Michael Garretson: [email protected] For policy questions, send mail to: Richard Nute: [email protected] ------------------------------------------- This message is from the IEEE EMC Society Product Safety Technical Committee emc-pstc discussion list. To cancel your subscription, send mail to: [email protected] with the single line: unsubscribe emc-pstc For help, send mail to the list administrators: Jim Bacher: [email protected] Michael Garretson: [email protected] For policy questions, send mail to: Richard Nute: [email protected]
