Background about Ascend and Lucent :
All over the year 2003,
we got a lot of requests for help from Europe, Brasil, all over the US around the world to Japan and South-Korea, from Norway to South Africa. In most cases we could help or we did redirect the call to one of our partners in the US, which are on file here.
The more we are active and the longer this web is online, we receive more and more information about the last days of Ascend and the way down of Lucent. We will not publish any authors name, but believe me, the stories are horrific.
Dec. 2002
The web is at the age of 4 months now and its slightly known in many regions of the world. We get more and more feedback from all kind of people and we are very thankful.
2003- So we have to correct some facts :
The Ascend European Technical Support Center in Sofia Antipolis, FRANCE has not been closed. It´s name has just changed to EMEA TAC. (technical assistance center)
Update 2004 - EMEA TAC in Sofia Antipolis has been closed.
In late 2001 we got some qualified answers on our extensive questions. In fact, the service was driven down for the following reasons:
A) Support Organization has changed.
- - Technical Support Level 1 (formerly TAC). They cannot answer very technical questions on your problem as they work on too many different Lucent products and they do not have enough time to go deeper
- - Technical Support Level 2 (formerly MASG, Major Account Support Group)
- - Technical Support Level 3 (formerly ESCALATION, last level support group before R&D) These levels still exist but you cannot access it. Too expensive for level 2. And, when you access level 3, it is probably too late for your customer (he has bought an other equipment).
B) Support contracts have became too expensive.
Mid-companies buy cheap "service contract" (only access to the TAC) and they did not receive the expected service.
C) In these big companies (comment: Ascend was integrated into a large Lucent Service),
it is not easy to find out the right contact you need and nobody seems to be concerned. It has nothing to do with companies like Livingston or Ascend.
D) Ascend management people have gone.
(comment : As we know, Ascend was sold for US $ 19.3 billions (=Milliarden) in cash, dated to end of 1998. In the US, more than 80% of the old Ascend employies left the company in less than 12 month.)
Sept. 2002 - First edition of our known shortform history, internal information and personal experience.
Since Lucent Technologies bought Ascend (the most experienced Router Company beside Cisco) in Jan. 1999 for round about 19,3 billion US dollars, the products and the service and the image was driven down to nearly zero. Currently (Dec 02) we were told by sales people, that Lucent is adressing the upper 100 communication companies worldwide with the Lucent top equipment. The Ascend small ISP and midrange products are no more included in this new strategy. That means, all models up to the MAX TNT and the large switches formerly known as Cascade are out.
When the Lucent Inc. in the USA did run out of cash, as we got told, they closed the well known Ascend "European Technical Support Center" in France. As we know, all technicians are "away" now.
To repair an Ascend/Lucent Product means, to spend a lot of time, to find out an experienced employe anywhere in the world, to get help from.
I heard, that there should be an outsourced service somewhere in Ireland or south of France. But prior an action, you need to sign an expensive service contract, not having experienced and skilled people on the phone. The rumors say, its hopeless to deal with them. So we didnt try it.
Because we own and run a lot more than a handful Ascend routers, we know about the strenght and the weakness of these products. At least two of our MAX 4000 routers are running since early 1997 - day and night - without any problem.
We are very happy with them and we did buy and we are buying more and more all types of Ascend MAXen.