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Cisco Exits the Consumer Market, Sells Linksys To Belkin
Krystalo writes "Belkin on Thursday announced plans to acquire Cisco's Home Networking Business Unit, including its products, technology, employees, and even the well-known Linksys brand. Belkin says it plans to maintain the Linksys brand and will offer support for Linksys products as part of the transaction, financial details for which were not disclosed. This should be a relatively smooth transition that won't affect current customers: Belkin says it will honor all valid warranties for current and future Linksys products. After the transaction closes, Belkin will account for approximately 30 percent of the U.S. retail home and small business networking market."
Cisco is to the consumer market what Oracle is to Java.
I was always confused with where Linksys belonged under Cisco. The not quite SOHO, not quite SME limbo was reflected on some of their decisions. Well, this just proves Cisco has no idea what to do with the general consumer market (E.G. The Flip).
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
>'This should be a relatively smooth transition that won't affect current customers"
Every time some corporate droid has told me this regarding a {buyout, merger, acquisition, sale, re-org} a major cockup has followed. The only thing worse is when they use the phrase, "transparent to the end user," and you know the apocalypse is coming next week.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Don't be ridiculous. There's plenty of great routers out there. My Cisco E1000 is working flawlessly, now that it's loaded with DD-WRT.
Now, if you're looking for a consumer-grade router that has both great hardware and firmware out of the box, you can forget about it, but I'm not sure such a beast has ever existed. But there's lots of decent hardware out there that can be reflashed with an alternative firmware like DD-WRT. The enterprise-grade stuff is crap too BTW: I used to have a couple of Aironet access points and those things were a total PITA to set up because of Cisco's wacky IOS system. The hardware was really nice, I'll admit (all-metal chassis, kinda looks like something out of a UFO, could be dropped off the Empire State Building and suffer only slight damage), but the software and web interface were ridiculously bad unless you want to spend a lot of time becoming an expert in IOS. By contrast, DD-WRT does pretty much everything IOS could do (including RADIUS authentication) and it, despite being Free, has a perfectly usable web interface that anyone competent with computers and networking can look at once and figure out.
Wonderful, now there's no good router on the market.
There never was, if you're talking Consumer grade. Belkin, Netgear, and Linksys all have shit models and a few good models, and for each model they have decent versions and shit versions. The only thing that made Linksys any "better" overall was the ease of loading your own firmware, but if you're not into that type of thing then there's no clear winner or loser. You really need to do your homework on specific models and not automatically dismiss or include any particular brand.
Another word of caution- don't purchase from discount retail outlets, especially Wal-Mart. They often will make such large purchases that the router maker will actually contract a special production run from an especially shitty chip production facility so they can give a really good price to the store. The result is a much higher than normal failure rate if you're putting any significant load on the equipment.
Another option to consider is to ignore the price savings you get for buying an "all in one" unit. You can really get a lot more done if you use a stand-alone wireless access point and hook it to a decent wired router instead of using the wireless router combo unit. If you're going to be doing a lot of switching on your LAN, use an external switch instead of the built-in 5 port one. Those low-end consumer models simply don't have enough backplane capacity, not to mention RAM and CPU power, to use all the options to their fullest.