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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