[Asterisk-Users] Digium Hardware Reliability

[Rich Adamson]

Cory Andrews wrote:
> To get an accurate portrayal of defect rate, a very large sample size 
> will obviously result in a more accurate calculation.  I calculated a 
> defect rate of between 1-2% for Digium products, based on an arbitrary 
> sample size of 5000 units.  These included “ALL” Digium products, not 
> just TDM products.  This does not account for shipping mishandling, or 
> onsite mishandling leading to failure.  Excluding those factors, I’d 
> offer an educated assessment of around 1% DOA/Failure rate.  Waiting on 
> Sangoma data which is likely about the same.
> 
>  
> 
> I can’t find an “industry standard” defect rate for general electronic 
> components, but 1% seems pretty low.

Depends on what level of "quality" you truly want to engineer to. If one 
wants to think in terms of some of the better commercial gear, five 
nines would be a reasonable "objective" (eg, 99.999% uptime). Since the 
piece parts have to be as good as the objective, an in-service failure 
rate of 0.001% must be achieved.

If that's the level of quality expected from a working system, it would 
certainly seem like a 1% out-of-box failure rate is high. But, I think 
we all understand that asterisk and all associated components are not 
engineered to five nines. ;)