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3com to Compete with Cisco
RNelson writes "3com has announced its new lines of routers poised to compete with Cisco. 'The company claims that these routers will cost 30 percent to 50 percent less than similar offerings from market leader Cisco.' The new routers compete the Cisco's 3725, 3745, and 83xx routers."
compete with Juniper? Since Juniper got Netscreen, they look like a nice player to compete with Cisco. We'll see if this is a three horse race, but I like what Juniper's doing. Their SSL VPN appliance is also very sweet.
3Com's router/switch business got beat up precisely because it couldn't compete with Cisco gears. Are they back for more black eyes?
How hard is that? Cisco sells their name, not equipment. While they are not in the same position Intel was before Amd became a threat, it's close enough to be useful for this discussion. Cisco can charge what they want, within the realm of semi-reasonability, and they will get it. Because, it's the name, not equipment or capabilities.
3com knows this, I suspect, which is why they are lowballing them. I would even suspect they think high enough of their name to not charge less than 30-50% less than cisco stuff.
You want to entice purchasing managers, but keep your name "good" in their eyes as well.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Yeah, they're still kicking. They have a decent marketshare in the NIC business, and are also semi-competitive in the workgroup-level switching arena as well.
I've always sworn by their network cards... they're always the first name I turn to.
You know, a while ago Cisco brought suit against the Chinese technology company Huawei for allegedly stealing Cisco's IOS interface and perhaps even code for their routers. I believe the suit was eventually settled with Huawei agreeing that they will "cease and desist". And now 3Com seems to have buddied up with Huawei and come up with their own line of routers, which seems to be 3Com's attempt to be everything to everybody. The problem is that you can only cram so much technology into the box without charging extra for it, as 3Com is doing. With Cisco's dominance in the market place, sooner or later it will hit you in the bottom line and you will be left with very limited set of choices.
The new routers compete the Cisco's 3725, 3745, and 83xx routers.
Hehe.
The new routers compete the Cisco. 3com have no chance to survive make your time.
If I recall, Cisco owns Linksys....
-beaker
Here where i work i would rather use 3com than cisco. Even though pretty much every equipment we have is from cisco, imo 3com software is much easier to use than ciscos ios.
also i hate all the different software versions (SMI, EMI, etc) that comes preinstalled in cisco switches.
Or can I get the same certificates from 3com for 30-50% less work and knowledge?
For this article to be posted, we must either hate or love one of Cisco or 3Com.
I can't think of any reason to particularly give a hoot about either, but this non-news article could only have been posted as a chance to flame a company we hate, or praise a company we love.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
3Com is claiming exactly what everyone wishes to claim, their product is better, their service is better and more in tune with what the customer wants, and above all its cheaper. What they are claiming is not even possible by NASA. You can't have everything as it goes. Every company has found this out and concentrated on 2 of the above. Cisco has decided to provide the best but for a premium, 3com wants it all for less. How do they see themselves as competing against the industy measuring stick in product AND provide it cheaper? Last time I saw one of these claims wasn't from a Fortune 500 company, it was an infomercial declaring its blender could take the place of 50+ kitchen appliences. In this world of computers you get what you pay for and only stiff compitition can drive down a price, not a loose claim from an outdated company. 3com may have balls to make such a large claim, but obviously not the brains to make it happen.
I used to work for them, and I will say each component in their line is probably overpriced for what it is.
That said, you don't just pay for the name, you pay for the brand, the relationship, the support, and the leadership. They do something similar to what Microsoft does, but in a much more benign way, IMHO. They make sure their products work well and give advantages in the way they interact with other Cisco equipment, but then they work with others on interoperability as well. This creates a level playing field and allows "innovation" in important areas, but then they work closely with standards bodies to standardize the parts that "deserve" to be universally applied across the whole internet.
One such example is multicasting. There are many different standards for multicasting, *even across Cisco's own line*! However, they will work to standardize it and then implement that standard on all of their routers and encourage others to do the same through marketing, partnering, and collaborative development. They line up everyone in advance, even competitors, and work to get such a standard universally accepted.
Basically, they really do have true leadership. They choose the protocols and technologies that have a chance of getting wide adoption, and make sure that they are the ones behind them. That increases their visibility and credibility in a self-perpetuating cycle.
Of course, I might be biased from having worked with them, so I would love to hear other opinions. I came away thinking that it's a first class organization, and while not perfect, is certainly a model for how competition, cooperation, and coordination should interact.
I love Cisco stuff. I does everything I want, it does it well, and it doesn't break.
3com have some good products, but in my experience they don't scale. If I was installing a 10 person office, a 3com firewall and switch is fine. But I wouldn't put 3Com anywhere except the access layer.
I'd also avoid 3coms VoIP solutions. I don't like their WoS, and the NBX is a dog. I'm not about to recommended Cisco because I have no experience with it, but 3Com won't even make it to the short list.
Didn't know about the NetGear/Juniper fusion. Juniper's high-end stuff is great, but way more than all but the largest enterprises and carriers would need. The Netgear lines will complement this well.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Eh? Just got into the router business? 3Com has been doing routers for YEARS now. Their core business was Ethernet from the start. It was only when they started trying to do EVERYTHING ELSE that they got in trouble. They were doing packet filters on their routers before it was in style. I remember working on a NetBuilderII router back in '97-'98 and updating packet filters.
Hi-Technical Excellent Taste and Flavor!
Out of hundreds of their products one (and based on Linux!) has a problem. Big deal...
Cisco at least provides publicly information about their security problems and makes timely fixes. It makes no sense bashing them - everyone else will have a problem sooner or later...
"Given Linux security history, switching to someone else might be a good idea."
Cisco is in an interesting position in spite of buying linksys, they will face competition from 3com (who is positioned below them in the market now) and from above by Juniper. Both Juniper and 3Com are getting into the access router comptetion.
I'd like to know if 3com has some or any of the convergence features (voip, ipv6, qos, multicast) that new networks often need. Cisco access routers may cost, but it is easy to implement a network with some excellent modern features. Cisco has a modular product line that will allow you to implement without VOIP or other features and then later add it easily. It is also easy to find people familiar with cisco IOS command line. You may pay less for a 3com router, and then waste time configuring it or finding out you can't configure the features you need.
For Juniper a different set of problems (as there are a few people out there that know JunOS and there is a training infrastructure for it like Cisco). Juniper may have the convergence features (I don't know I haven't looked at the product line), but it is more likely as they are moving from the top down.
Cisco will face some interesting comptetion, but I'm sure they will respond- which can only be good for the customer.
-A
Disclaimer: I am Cisco certified and like using their networking equipment.
The author mentions that these products compete against the Cisco 3725, 3745, and 83xx (that should read 8xx series) routers.
In related news, Cisco today announced three new router families, the 1800 series, the 2800 series, and the 3800 series, which are positioned to replace the 1700, 2600, and 3700 series. Nice of 3Com to position against an obsolete technology platform
Competitors are crawling out of the woodwork with products positioned against Cisco's old tired iron, but Cisco isn't exactly sitting back on its laurels and scratching its head.
What all these competitors are missing is that Cisco's router strategy has subtly changed in the last 18 months: voice features and services are a key part of Cisco's differentiation, and none of its competitors, be it Juniper, ADTRAN, Tasman, Enterasys, or 3Com, have stepped up to challenge Cisco on that front.
VoIP is an ideal in the branch office, and Cisco is in a cushy position to get a corner on that market unless some of its competitors get their act together.
....of discontinuing products and then removing every trace of that product on their website (firmware, manuals, etc) and that will keep me from ever buying or recommending their products. I have an entire wireless setup at home, 3 "Office Gateways" and some other gear (not in use) that I should just throw away because they don't even acknowledge its existence, much less provide me with a PCMCIA card driver or access point/router firmware.
-Randy
Yeah, because look at how secure 3COM's officeconnect firewalls are. If you are a neophite to networking, then you can go with a 3com "my first NAT device" or now, a 3com "my first router". But if you have an office enviorment, you might want to look at a real security product, such as a PIX.
Given that cisco deliberately installed backdoors, I'd say yes, it's a more secure option. Unless you feel it's reasonable for backdoors to be hidden in your router code...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
3Com used to be in the higher end switching market with pretty big gear - the Corebuilder 9000 was their high end chassis and was NICE. In fact, at one point (1999), they were the number two vendor in the market right behind Cisco. After working with 3Com and Cisco for a replacement of my campus network (I managed the network group at a college at the time), I selected 3Com based on the equipment features and the VERY attractive price in relation to the Cisco solution. The sales reps from 3Com were confident in the solution and in the support we'd get from 3Com moving forward
Two months after my installation was complete, 3Com EXITED the market. Yes - they immediately discontinued ALL of the brand new gear that we had just purchased. No notice. On a Monday morning, it was in the papers.
They botched their rep ALL over the place. I doubt I'd touch their new gear with a 10 foot pole. They're one of the flakiest companies I've ever had the misfortune to work with. Good gear, but absolutely horrid management.
That's an interesting thought. Didn't I hear about those somewhere before. Yeah, that's it. They used to sell routers and vacated the market. Rather quickly if I recall and a number of people got stuck with gear that they couldn't use.
I just don't know how quickly people will be to jump on the bandwagon with an organization that left many of there customers hanging with a "we're not doing this business anymore" message 3-4 years ago.
3com is a low-quality manufacturer and has been at least for the last 10 years. And I am talking manufacturing and design here.
My first experience was a 10-pack of 3com network cards about 8 years back: Some were fast, some were slow, some produced so many bugs that the router (Cisco) disabled the interface. These were cards with consecutive serial numbers! My explanation is very poor Q/A on the cards. I never have had this type of problems with any cheack RTL8xxx card from Taiwan.
The second experience was an unusable "Office" switch, that had a noisy and very poorly designed switching regulator in it. That was 1 year back. The switch finally died becayse they also had cut the leads of the power semiconductor too long and in short-circuited. I declined a replacement, since it also ran so hot, that it would have dies in a few months anyway. I have now a far cheaprt router by Netgear, with no such problems and overall far more solid design and manufacturing. And cheaper as well.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'd pay more for an unknown brand because at least I have a chance at it working.
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
Okay, so recently I had the misfortune of using some 3com NICs in FreeBSD servers for a project. I hereby swear off the use of 3com cards. I notice that on multiple switches the thruput is horrible (Cabletron ELS and 7C, Netgear, Cisco 5513).
:-) Look for copyrights and look up the no-names you see on the copyrights.
Also, where I used to work they bought a 3com RAS solution. The CLI was pretty bad compared to my favorite at the time, Livingston Portmasters. It was overpriced, and just seemed like a botched design with the CPU in one box and a $2000 add on with 4 modems in it.
Some people seem to have a thing for 3com. I think it is mostly the people that used their cards when 3com was the major player. Their earlier switches do seem rugged, but I'd probably look to SMC Tigerswitch (owned by Enterasys now?) before 3com for a SOHO deployment. I'm odd, even for SOHO I like managed switches and rackmount. And metal boxes, I dig NetGears form factors. PS, is NetGear still tied to Bay? Bay was sold to Nortel, Netgear used to be Bay Networks. Is Netgear Notel or the existing Bay Networks? Confusion.
I'd imagine it is management that plauges 3com. They announced the end of all high end products a while ago, since Cisco's market share was owning them (and others like Riverstone, Extreme, Enterasys, Foundry). They wanted to concentrate on their NICs (one word, intel Pro 10/100) and little baby network devices.
Cisco dominates the market. I own a few pieces of Cisco gear, ALOT of Cabletron/Enterasys surplus and many of the smaller vendors. Cisco gear is indeed nice, I like it but there is a premium to be paid (unless your like me and buy from eBay, a practice Cisco tried unsuccessfully to stop).
There have been alot of small players that might have competed but the major players buy them up. Prominet got bought by Lucent, their products became the Cajun family (and Intel resold some of their stuff). There are others (ELS series from Cabletron was a smaller company that got bought out). You can see it when you dig thru the firmware binaries
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
..3Com used to make all kinds of high-end networking gear (those of you in the cable industry will be familiar with 3Com CMTSes). Their kit never adhered to standards ("DOCSIS? What's DOCSIS?" - as if DOCSIS equipment needed any help being incompatible and/or unpredictable with other DOCSIS gear), never worked properly, and their support was always terrible.
One of our customers bought about $50k worth of 3Com broadband over cable equipment, called a few days later to ask about a firmware upgrade, and were informed that 3Com had never made such a piece of equipment.
Classy.
-Matt
Purchased
Free
Secure
Any combination of the above three.
Back in the day when I was buying my first real Router a 20k unit from Cisco I had looked at a similar 3com offering. It was clear it was better on a pure packet handling basis, but the software wasn't anything I needed. I think it did some Novel Routing and TCP/IP (et. al.), but I didn't have support for sample for giving ethernet routing to Apple computers "then" still on LocalTalk (a key feature for me); but it was more than just Apple support. Cisco had much more software in Router to really let me set up the network I really needed...
I hope they have learned from that lesson...
http://www.hawknest.com/
I don't use 3com NICs that much - I mostly use intel cards. I didn't have the problems others have described with their NICs, the failure rate may have been a little higher than the others, but I stopped using them because we noticed a considerable performance gain from using intel cards (not because their hardware failed so much)...
Where I really draw experience from 3com is their switches and routers, neither of which I'll ever use again.
Scenario:
1 x 7513 connected to a switch via a PA-2FE on a VIP2-50
1 x 3com 24 port switch connected to the cisco router and connected to
8x Acend Max TNT's each with 672 DS0's and 1xFE.
Two observations:
First, the switch wasn't nearly as configurable as the competing cisco switch (2924xl). It had a neat web interface with java applets but in general its software configuration was limited, and its cli sucked.
Second, under no load the switch was fine. However, under the heavy load of 5376 dialup users sharing a 100 megabit connection the switch had serious packet problems, or lack of packets since it dropped most of them. It couldn't do the packets per second that the 2924 could, even if under no load the throughput was reasonable.
In general the switch from 3com, which wasn't much cheaper than the cisco switch performed terribly.
Second scenario:
1 x adtran TSU
1 x 3com t1 (well, v35) router
I had to configure this piece of junk for a customer and I have to say that its CLI is the worst I have ever worked with. Yeah, its even worse than the xedia CLI for those who have also been unfortunate enough to work with those boxes. What should have taken minutes, and would have with a well thought out CLI took hours.
In short, 3com don't even get into the business. Stay in the consumer sector where people don't have a clue - because I and anyone else who has really put your "enterprise" products to the test already know to stay away from you - we won't be buying. You burned us once, then instead of making things right and fixing your software issues, you exited the market leaving us high and dry.
They had to make up for the fact that they can't sell a 14.4 modem for $300 anymore!
Only if 3Com provided a IOS-like command line interface will they be able to gain market share among trained CCIE/CCNA/... personnel. Of course, they will have to provide high quality (*cough*) equipment too...
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I work in an environment with a mix of Cisco 2600, 3600, and 3700 routers and Cisco 2900XL, 2950, and 2970 switches. I can tell you from experience 3Com will never get in the door here with their substandard goods. We've had countless 3Com 3C905, 3C509, etc etc NIC's go bad for no reason. I wouldn't trust our business to 3Com switches or routers.
I would consider Juniper or Foundry equipment for certain applications, but not without demo hardware first to see how they integrated into our stricly Cisco network. VLAN trunking, spanning-tree, etc can differ immensly from one vendor to the next. Sometimes even the same vendor but different models do not interoperate quit the way one would expect.
In any case, if you are on the fence with either Cisco or 3Com, I'd tell you Cisco. We have lots of Layer 2 switches that they replace overnight with no issues. I've had Cisco send me exact replicas of routers in less than 4 hours (courier service), complete with memory and flash to test problems with integration. They really do offer top notch customer support and service.
Things I do not like about Cisco. If you buy hardware used from anyone but Cisco, it has to be recertified by Cisco Engineers before you can put it on Cisco maintenance. Sounds logical? Sure, until you see to recertify hardware is about the same price as getting some newer, faster, and more featured. I go through a nightmare every year when it comes time to renew our maintenance contract. I won't go into details, but it seems their database for this information is very cumbersome for the reps. They lack SSH as a standard connection option. Without certain IOSes this feature is not available at all. I wish they would change this.
"Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps." ~ Emo Phillips
Cisco IOS is great.
Yes it hasn't been consistent historically. That's because the Catalyst 5000 line was a purchased product, using "Catalyst OS".
Nowadays, all switches are coming with IOS, unless you specify Cat OS (can only put Cat OS on the chassis switches)
Plus - it's not an apples to apples comparison to compare IOS on the 3600 (router) to IOS on a 3500 (switch). The functions are inherently different.
IOS is not hard once you learn a few basics. You can practially build the commands without ever looking at documentation. For that matter all the docs are freely available on Cisco's website.
I have never seen Alcatel's gear or the OS. From looking at the documentation, Alcatel's CLI is a knock-off of IOS. That would leave you using the web interface. Cisco has a web GUI as well. I wouldn't use it, but it's there.
Sounds like you don't do enough networking to even make an educated evaluation of hardware or operating system.
I love it when bean counters decide that years of end-user pain and agony is worth $500 or $1000 savings on a cheap piece of hardware.
I've installed, maintained, configured, and troubleshooted hundreds of routers over the past 10 years. Hardware costs are not the only thing to consider. If you think saving 30%-50% in hardware costs is great, how about spending 200% more in labor costs, year after year? How about outfitting your NOC with an expensive new monitoring package exclusively designed for your new hardware? How about facing growth limits? How about watching your network go from 99.9999% uptime to something less?
What do you tell your customer/client base? "We're saving $1000 per router. I'm sorry that you'll have to live with ______ and ______ for the next few years." What is that worth to you? When there is trouble, listen to the vendors bicker over the reason(s). What is it worth to wait 1 year or more for a bug fix? And then discover that in order to get that bug fix, you might have to buy new hardware?
People don't realize what's involved in building a network. Reliability, room-for-growth, and features are everything. There are problems in every network. Giving your users a productive, working environment is the ultimate goal. Gambling with new hardware is not something I'd like to do very often.
I can guarantee this: I'll pay double for a reliable piece of hardware that does EXACTLY what I want, all the time when I know that the other end is the same brand of hardware. Plus, the carrier in between is using the same hardware. Plus, it's been lab tested by everyone. It gets better: One phone call and all my problems and answers are readily available. Every one of those things saves time and money. User experience is more positive because features are better, and there isn't any finger pointing between hardware vendors. I don't have to spend money buying multiple hardware platforms to labtest. I don't have to worry about mixed-vendor networks. Have you ever installed a mixed-vendor network? It's one of the most painful experiences you could ever have. I would put it right up there with kidney stones, and having fingernails forcibly removed with a pair of pliers.
Bean counters that want cheap hardware are usually going to pay increased labor costs. They will have workarounds and painful experiences for their end-users. It's NOT WORTH IT! If you want 99.9999% uptime, error-free performance, buy the best product available.
Cheap hardware is almost always feature-less, inflexible, and painful to live with. How many people remember 3Com's last go-around with routers? Easy to configure, but limited flexibility, and lacking features makes it harder to live with in the long run. Oh, and darn near impossible to troubleshoot. We had to outfit all of our technicians with $100K protocol analyzers to prove the trouble to cheap 3Com (and other) hardware because of the finger-pointing.
Look at it another way: If you're buying a Cadillac for the home office, why would you buy a Ford Pinto for the remote offices? It doesn't make sense. If you were building a space shuttle... are you going to use the cheapest hardware? Why would you do that with your network? There's a reason why Cisco has 90% of the market. Cisco has the most features. Everything hinges on software. While there are bugs in software, Cisco OS is fantastic. Features like EIGRP and HSRP make Cisco worthwhile. Interoperability with Cisco's LAN equipment make it worthwhile. Also, think about training, grey market materials, and used goods. Cisco is out there, commonly available. If you pick 3Com access routers, you've got to hire/train people to handle a new brand of unknown hardware. Training is expensive. And if your best-trained expert leaves, you've got to go find someone else. Finding Cisco people is easier.
People talk about Juniper. Juniper excels at one specific niche. The big, big router... basically IP to OC48 stuff. How many of those do you need? Juniper talks about the "pepsi challenge", but frankly, they'll have to go over and above Cisco to win my vote. There are other products, but you still end up with a mixed-vendor network.
-- No sig for you!