Hello, I'm the author of this test.

I didn't use price as a test criterion for this project because Network World asked me not to. Two issues went into that decision:

1. List prices are squishy. Especially for medium and large sized enterprises, list prices are often heavily discounted; prices vary HUGELY country to country (which is a scandal on its own, but vendor country pricing wasn't the device under test here); and one nominal reason for publications doing testing at all is to show you things you can't find out yourself -- such as scalability, security, and manageability of many switches all in one place. Your sales rep will still be happy to quote you a price.

2. There's a process issue. We told vendors price would not be a test criterion prior to them deciding to participate, and prior to them deciding which switch to send. I don't believe it could reasonably be called fair to ding a product on price if we'd told the particpating vendor we wouldn't be comparing on price.

Of course price is a consideration for many (though not all) enterprises buying switches. We've used it as a test criterion in previous tests, and will do again in future tests (including an upcoming one on enterprise 802.11n solutions).

Regards,
David Newman