Fudge

The Staple of Telecom

'Our backbone is a 1 Terabyte backbone!' Yeah right.

It's easy to fudge numbers, whether financial numbers or speed numbers. Sales people throw out acronyms like little old ladies throw out bread crumbs to pigeons, knowing that the cooler they sound the better the chance of getting a sale. The chances of those acronyms actually meaning anything or having anything to do with what the vendor actually offers doesn't matter.

And the outright deception - Sales Person A promises XYZ and then is later told by Implementation Engineer B the company cannot do XYZ and will not be able to do XYZ for another six months at best...

The hardware/software vendors are just as bad. Cisco is a great example. Cisco advertises that its xxxx router has a 1-Terabit backplane. Sounds impressive, especially when compared with Juniper, Cisco's biggest competition in the core-router market, whose xxxx router only has a 1-Gigabit backplane. But if one is smart enough to read the technical specs and ask the tough questions, one finds out that Juniper's backplane is truly a 1-Gigabit backplane - it will transmit a full Gigabit of traffic across all channels at any one time - while Cisco's fudged the numbers: they add up all the channels on the backplane, multiply that sum by the maximum theoretical speed of the fastest channel on the backplane, and - lo and behold - arrive at 1 Terabit.

But Cisco's channels are shared, so the only way their channel will ever get 1 Gigabit is if no other channels are transferring data.

WorldCom, Cisco, Lucent, Nortel, Alcatel, HP - the list is very long.