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Buffalo Tech Gets New Trial On Wi-Fi Patent
MrLint writes "It's been a long, nearly two years of silence since CSIRO won a patent battle against Buffalo Tech, causing an injunction preventing the Austin company from selling wireless routers. On September 19, 2008, a Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that CSIRO patent claims are invalid and Buffalo is getting a new trial. With any luck, we will be able to get our grubby hands on low-cost Wi-Fi routers again!"
I paid 29 bucks for mine.
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You just had to order them from Europe. Kind of a pain, but they're quality routers. Hopefully at the end of this trial we wont have to circumvent the system though in order to get our "grubby hands" on some quality, dd-wrt running hardware.
The Federal Circuit only reversed summary judgment as to obviousness of CSIRO's patents. This means that Buffalo Tech. will have a chance to make its case on that issue alone. You see, based on the silence of the BT press release on the other issues against BT on summary judgment, I would have to conclude that the Federal Circuit upheld those.
I also have to add that the lawsuit is filed in the plaintiff-friendly (to put it softly) E.D. Texas.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Well, for whatever it's worth, I've installed a LOT of wireless routers for people over the years - and I learned to generally AVOID Belkin.
If you've got one that's working well for you, great. But on the whole, they were known for having sub-standard firmware in their devices. I remember, for example, when 802.11g was the "latest and greatest thing", Belkin had a "g" capable router that had a major bug in the firmware, preventing any "g" devices from connecting to it if it was configured to also allow backwards compatibility with "b" devices.
They did release a firmware update to correct that, but you still had a relatively weak/limited set of configuration options in the product.
I also recall finding Belkin wi-fi routers to have worse-than-average range.
People seemed to generally like Buffalo because they were priced a little bit lower than the competition, especially on things like wireless access points (which seem to generally be a big ripoff to this day, since they cost 2x to 3x more than a full-blown router, which can be programmed to function as an access point anyway!). That and they gave good performance for the money, and had better than average web-based interfaces.
- They are quality routers
- You can flash them with some excellent software
- Sync them up so you have longer wi-fi distance running through you house, apt, etc.
- Their range tends to be larger than other routers.
Belkins, netgear, Linksys always seem to have died on me, but my Buffalos are still roaming -bad pun intended :)
From my experience Belkin routers become unreliable quite easily.
Your history of Belkin's sins omits the most amusing one: At one point, they baked firmware into their routers that would, from time to time, jack an http request from a machine on the lan, and feed them that image instead. Major WTF. Slashdot had the story back in the day.
"On September 19, 2008, a Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that CSIRO patent claims are invalid and Buffalo is getting a new trial."
The Circuit court did no such thing - it ruled that the judge had erred in issuing a summary judgment, and it needed to go back to trial. NOWHERE in the link does it say that the Appellate Court ruled on the validity of the patent.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Belkin, Netgear, Linksys, Buffalo, & D-Link are your major home/small office brands.
They all have stinkers, they all have decent models.
In general however, Netgear tends to come in at the bottom of the price AND quality range, with a few in the mid-range of quality, Belkin is sort of like this as well, but maybe a little better.
D-Link & Linksys tend to have more models that are average or slightly above average, both in price & quality. D-Link had some firmware issues a while back, and Linksys you need to check the product VERSION in addition to model numbers.
I've heard good & bad about all the brands, basically do your research, they all have ups & downs.
If you hear anybody ranting about how great or terrible one brand is in general, they probably have some bias.
CSIRO is an Aussie Government research institute. They come up with a lot of awesome technologies used around the world and the money is channeled back into R&D. Australia has so few research labs CSIRO is one of the few that is still around. I hope they win because the work they do is outstanding and they're one of the last bastions of creative development in Australia.
I like Buffalo because:
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50