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."

Comments

WTB Cisco Switch

[ButchDeLoria]

Wonderful, now there's no good router on the market.

Re:WTB Cisco Switch

[Grishnakh]

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.

Re:WTB Cisco Switch

[MrBippers]

My current Asus router (dd-WRT) and the Buffalo router it replaced (tomato) have been flawless. I remember having a Linksys WRT54G with a legitimate hardware issue years ago and having to jump through a massive array of hoops to actually convince of it. There was a massive chain of emails every single question of which could have been answered by reading the first email I sent. No love lost here.

Re:WTB Cisco Switch

[SolitaryMan]

My experience with Linksys consumer routers is that they are crap. IMO they were only damaging Cisco's brand. Good riddance for them.

Re:WTB Cisco Switch

[mrops]

Actually, I have found Netgear to be consistently better than Linksys/Cisco routers for a long long time. Two linksys I owned would hang and reboo often in the 802.11g days.

Moved to a netgear 802.11n router and has been great.

Re:WTB Cisco Switch

[Ironhandx]

I have a 3400 sqft house with a single Asus router running the whole deal.

I also went through 2 WRT54G's in as many years. I find both stories believeable, but of the people I know, no one is actually still using their WRT54G for anything other than one guy is using it for a small wired subnet. The wireless generally loses range on them as they get older for some inexplicable reason.

Re:WTB Cisco Switch

[mattventura]

They just try to cut costs way too much on their home products. They know that home users are likely to just buy whatever looks best on the store shelf/whatever the salesman tries to push on them.

Re:WTB Cisco Switch

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Finally

[mrmeval]

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.

Re:Finally

[SJHillman]

Linksys hardware under Cisco was pretty good. The firmware is what really bombed. I'll still take a Linksys any day so long as I can put DD-WRT or similar on it.

What does CISCO stand for?

[OhANameWhatName]

Choice of
Investments
Suck
Causing
Outrage

Join in the fun!

Re:What does CISCO stand for?

[Austerity Empowers]

Casualty In Senseless Chinese Outsourcing

Re:What does CISCO stand for?

[ColdWetDog]

Two pounds. Are you an American or something?

Not that they were doing much with the brand

[eksith]

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).

Re:Not that they were doing much with the brand

[Lehk228]

linksys was getting good enough to compete in SO and SME and even for peripheral installs in large enterprise. this would have cost Cisco a lot of money, so they bought them up and made them shitty

Belkin

[girlintraining]

I think I speak for many who have worked with 'Belkin' equipment when I say...

"Fuck."

and nothing of value was lost

[Anonymous Coward]

This is definitley a net improvement in quality for both Cisco and Belkin.

Everybody wins!

Good Riddance

[SpasticMutant]

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.

*sigh*

[SIGBUS]

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...

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

There's Buffalo. Buffalo is pretty good, and some of their routers come with a variant of WRT already installed.

Re:*sigh*

[scottbomb]

And Asus, makers of the only router I could find at Fry's that takes aftermarket antennas and flashes Tomaato.

Mixed reaction

[Megane]

Cisco sells Linksys

Yay!

...to Belkin

What in the actual fuck?

Prepare To Be Hosed

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

>'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.

Re:Prepare To Be Hosed

[Trailer Trash]

>'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.

The major cockup started a few years ago shortly after Cisco bought them. It can't get worse under Belkin.

It's sad, really. Back in the day I bought 7 or 8 Linksys routers, many of which were put into service in other ways using openwrt. The replaceable antennae was a wonderful feature that I never needed. A few of them didn't even have the radio turned on.

Anyway, I gave up with the Cisco fiasco and started buying Netgear. While Cisco was busy trying to sell the lowest-spec'd machines that still performed the basic functionality Netgear was selling me a router with the *very* decent hardware specs printed on the box. It totally kicks the asses of desktops that I was using 10 years ago.

So it's good to see Linksys isn't under Cisco anymore. Sad that it's with Belkin, but, whatever. At least there's still some competition.

More three card monte accounting games

[JoeyRox]

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.

Re:buyers

[afidel]

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.