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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."
Wonderful, now there's no good router on the market.
The Linksys stuff took a nose dive in both reliability and software quality under Cisco's steerage. Belkin does better for some things though they are spotty on others. They are a very large player and I hope they unfuck what cisco's been fucking up.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
What does this mean for the non-IOS/NXOS devices with roots at Linksys, did Chambers and company finally realize that they were diluting and tarnishing their name by slapping the Cisco logo on such utter crap?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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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.
Since the linksys branding to Cisco, is there a cheat sheet explaining which VoIP products are linksys and which are Cisco?
I think I speak for many who have worked with 'Belkin' equipment when I say...
"Fuck."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This is definitley a net improvement in quality for both Cisco and Belkin.
Everybody wins!
Linksys has always been, and will always be, a POS. Moving to Cisco made it even worse. Belkin wasn't any better, but at least they were cheaper. For my money, I prefer the Netgear home switch products. As my Linksys garbage fails, I replace with Netgear, and my problems disappear.
Indeed. Belkin has been on my "do not buy" list ever since the spam router fiasco. Then again, I guess it's fitting, after Linksys' Cloud Connect WTF.
On the other hand, anything that won't run DD-WRT, Tomato, or OpenWRT is on my "do not buy" list anyway...
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Cisco sells Linksys
Yay!
...to Belkin
What in the actual fuck?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
>'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.
It really depends what you're trying to do. D-Link's low-power gigabit switches are great, for a dumb switch, and most home users really don't need a managed switch. Sucking down only around 8 watts of power, they're nice and cool to the touch and pretty hard to beat. I also have an old D-Link 802.11g router that has travelled around the world with me, giving me wireless internet in the hotels that only provided wired. It's nothing fancy, but small and has gotten the job done, and has stood up to all the baggage handlers that have thrown it.
Linksys, eh, some of it's ok, some of it's crap. My main router is an old WRT54G or GL (It runs Linux, but I think it might be the early G before they split them into G/GL). The radio on it died some time ago, but the router portion still works OK and has survived several power issues that have killed my cable modems. One of these days I'll get around to configuring the Cisco that's sitting in the garage, but so far I haven't cared enough to bother with it.
Belkin, I decided all of it was crap the day I bought one and tried to change the internal IP to something other than the default 192.168.1.1, and it told me I couldn't. I called their tech support and they told me that was by design. I told them it was a crappy design, and returned the POS.
Surprisingly, some of the best (for the price) consumer gear I've used is the AirLink101 that Fry's used to sell. It was cheap, had decent build quality, and generally had all the features I really needed at 1/3 or less the price of Linksys.
I can't comment on Buffalo as I haven't used their stuff.
what about the CiscoPad iPad-killer tablet that they were gonna sell? Was it not a success?
That wasn't a consumer device, and not it was not.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I wasn't really talking about the routers (though most of them are crap, overheating problems abound, firmware is terrible, the whole cloud management fiasco, etc) but more things like the switches. I hear time and again from colleges that have to deal with clients with unmanaged or web "managed" switches that aren't working for whatever reason and where the consultant can't diagnose anything because the tools aren't there, the clients of course come back with "but I bought a Cisco, I was told they were the best!" Heck, our own telecom guy got suckered into that game, he told the VAR he needed an inexpensive Cisco switch for a midsized branch office, he was sold a Linksys unit with a Cisco badge, five dead ports and no ability to troubleshoot the issues later (probably $10k in lost productivity and IT time) and we finally had a real unit bought and sent to the location and haven't had a problem with it in 3 years.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Ever wonder why some companies seem to constantly be involved in acquisitions and dispositions, esp. companies whose organic growth has slowed to zero? It's because acquisitions/dispositions are a great way to create cookie jar charge-offs to hide underperformance of a company's core business. Now you see it, now you don't.
You were very confused, Linksys was a tiny gnat compared to Cisco when Cisco did the acquisition, Linksys cost Cisco $500M which was less than half of their net income for the quarter in which the deal closed. Hell, two years later they swallowed Scientific Atlantic which cost $6.9B.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This is more of a problem with people who don't see the up front value in someone who knows networking. Anybody who knows networking should be able to differentiate between an unmanaged, web-managed, and managed switch.
It frustrates the hell out of me to see people cheap out on the upfront cost and get upset when I have to charge them for all the time it takes to fix things. God forbid they listen to my recommendations.
Cheap storage VM.
Yeah, I have a site that has a WG302. The certificate expired after 3 years, in 2010. How did I know the cert expired? Because the whole thing stopped working. I set the clock back to 2006 and turned off time sync to get it to work. You can still buy them, but they won't work unless they think it is pre-2010. I wouldn't call a router reliable when it shuts down because it has the correct time.
> "Belkin says it plans to maintain the Linksys brand and will offer support for Linksys products as part of the transaction,"
Belkin says it really sucks to have to maintain the Linksys brand and offer support for Linksys products, but the law requires this at least for the guarantee period, so they will have to comply. What happens afterward is, as always, not a topic for a spokeperson. That would be something worth saying, and it's against the rules of a spokeperson, who never say anything useful or that we don't know already."
In an attempt to save some money for my business I bought several WAP4410N's in my office to provide wireless networking. They worked great, the setup was easy, they had good range and nice functionality, they were even quite cheap.
So, based on my good experiences with the AP's, I decided to use them in one of our other offices. I bought three of them and configured them like the first ones I bought. None of them worked..... They crashed at random (but at least a couple of times each day), multiple SSID's did work, RADIUS failed. After some research I realized that the sticker underneath the AP's said "V2", the first ones I bought said "V1". It turns out that Cisco had done "something" to the hardware and called it version 2.
Contacting Cisco was meaningless, the only answer I got was "Yes, we know it does not work, you should have bought something more expensive from us". Hopefully Belkin has a bit more respect for its customers.
Lucky you. I have this personality here that keeps women away.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
Their "small business" product lines can be very poor, too.
We kitted out a small office with Cisco equipment not long ago. Our expectation was that with Cisco behind it and paying professional-level prices we'd get something with professional-level reliability and support, a cut above the consumer-level junk where just about everyone's devices seem to have poor reliability and/or limited functionality.
The reality is that some of the Cisco equipment just didn't work properly. Firmware updates for some of the devices took a long time to arrive, or in some cases never appeared at all. Some of the products got EOL'd or sold off within a year or two, and it seems like a significant number of "Cisco" products are actually just rebadged products from another vendor with nerfed firmware anyway, even at this level.
Also, as a small business guy doing all the IT, I wouldn't even know who at Cisco to contact for support or how to reach them. We theoretically have an N year warranty, but there's basically no information included with the products about how to take advantage of it, and the Cisco web site is hopeless. All I need is a phone number I can call with the type of product and serial number to get some advice or report a problem, preferably within one click of the home page, but that appears to be beyond their ability. Of course, you can open a support case on-line if you have an expensive service contract, but we don't, and since numerous people have reported similar problems to ours and they never seem to get fixed, it's not clear that such a contract is worth anything anyway.
We now buy mostly consumer kit again, because it seems that even if you pay a premium for Cisco small business kit, what you get is actually as bad or worse as consumer tat. We've found isolated really good products from other suppliers, but they tend to be in niche markets rather than across-the-board kind of product ranges. For example, DrayTek seem to make very good ADSL routers and related devices at this kind of level. If they offered a wider product range of the same quality with basic small office level switches, wireless receivers/range extenders, and so on, we'd switch over in a heartbeat, but sadly they don't.
I am very keen to hear of positive experiences with other pro-grade equipment on a small business or serious SOHO kind of level from different vendors. When we were looking before, there didn't appear to be too many suppliers competing in that market, which was surprising and might have changed more recently.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You can get enterprise class equipment under $100, although around $100 to $150 is more reasonable. The home equipment just can't keep up with higher speed connections in my experience. Sometimes they slow things down without people realizing it, sometimes they lock up and need a reset (inconvenient if I'm trying to remote in from work). I use pfsense on Alix, but mikrotik and ubiquiti are very good choices for home and small business.
List of lacking features in consumer class routers (that many would find useful)
* multiple subnets
*vlan
* utilization graphs (have you hit your cap?)
*VPN (sometimes they support an awful proprietary implementation)
*readable logs
Cheap storage VM.