Belkin Acquires Cisco's Home networking Business

[mbossman2]

Belkin buys out Linksys from Cisco - PC Advisor

[glc]

Looks like my WRT54GL will be the last Linksys product I'll ever buy.

[Tin]

Originally Posted by glc Looks like my WRT54GL will be the last Linksys product I'll ever buy.

Took the words right out of my mouth.

[Force Flow]

Oh well

[BigRed CC Dually]

Originally Posted by glc Looks like my WRT54GL will be the last Linksys product I'll ever buy.

+1 here too George

[doubledragon5]

Originally Posted by glc Looks like my WRT54GL will be the last Linksys product I'll ever buy.

Is that good or bad? I have bought nothing but linksys and have been very happy..

[cmichael258]

Originally Posted by doubledragon5 Is that good or bad? I have bought nothing but linksys and have been very happy..

Was good; now not so good with future products. Fortunately, I have a spare
WRT54GL.

[HAL9000]

And the funny thing is... I swear I'm the only one that ever had grief with that particular router. Ran fine for a long time, then had issues where I had to reset it several times a day. Tried two more, same problem. Those two went back, the original, a friend bought from me and he's running it to this day no problem.

[doubledragon5]

Dave I bet it figured out you had bad luck with fords ROFL...

[sgtspector]

This is not good news. Every Belkin network product i have tried has been nothing but trouble. Maybe netgear will fill the void?

[Panama Red]

Guess I'll stick with Trendnet's el cheapo products. Had nothing but issues with Belkin, DLink and Netgear. Had a couple Trendnet issues too but it hurt a lot less to replace them.

[glc]

Originally Posted by sgtspector This is not good news. Every Belkin network product i have tried has been nothing but trouble. Maybe netgear will fill the void?

That's going from bad to worse. My next router will be an Asus. Whatever I get will have to be DD-WRT compatible.

Trendnet and TP-Link are decent cheapies, but I suspect some of them are actually made by Belkin.

[pam123]

A list of poorly performing Belkin home routers in this article : Cisco Tosses Baby Into Belkin Bathwater | PCMag.com

I agree that Cisco has recreated for itself the same problem Linksys was designed to get it out of.

[David M]

But as is so often with acquisitions and buys, the company doing the buying imprints its vision and way of doing things on the business it consumed, rather than taking a good look at what was attractive about buying the business in the first place, and keeping and enhancing what worked.

Interesting article Pam. Thanks for the link.

Rest in peace Linksys.

[mbossman2]

from a big picture perspective:

consumer/retail products, while they can be profitable, carry significant costs in support (technical and sales/marketing) vs the available margins (consumer products are low cost/low margins). In other areas where products are commoditized, companies can offset decreasing margins with services which are, generally, much higher but the consumer market does not drive those kinds of revenues and profits. This is also applicable to the dealers who sell these products (for the normal VAR, consumer/retail products can not provide the margin necessary to support the people necessary to be profitable).

Additionally, if you review Cisco's website, you will see that they have recently launched their "Internet of Everything" campaign. This campaign has the appearance of including consumer products but the bigger money (and profits) will be in the consultation and embedded products that will part of this drive.

[Panama Red]

When I think of previous "buy outs", Compaq and HP come to mind. Instead of raising the quality of Compaq to what was then a good product from HP, HP quality slipped to match that of Compaq. You can't make quality for cheaper prices. Then there's the deal with Gateway and EMachines. EM was a recognized cheapie and GW was a leader right up there with Dell. When the bottom fell out of the market, GW bought EM. BUT, the CEO of EMachines ran the new company! (huh??). GW used the EM marketing channels to move their products in a different way but the quality slipped just like HP. Then Acer came along and bought the GW/EM combo and all three of them suck! The only buy out that has happened and the quality has been good (to my knowledge) has been Lenovo taking the IBM personal pc line. I've sold a bunch of Lenovo laptops and desktops and only had one legit failure (mobo died after 18 mo - amd system)

[Tin]

Originally Posted by glc Whatever I get will have to be DD-WRT compatible.

Same here...well sort of. Ive been using OpenWRT the past few years, and its one hell of a workhorse. Lately, Ive been recommending the Asus RT-N16, and for those who want to spend the money, the RT-N66U. Both are very good routers.

[Petef56]

Originally Posted by Tin Same here...well sort of. Ive been using OpenWRT the past few years, and its one hell of a workhorse. Lately, Ive been recommending the Asus RT-N16, and for those who want to spend the money, the RT-N66U. Both are very good routers.

ASUS is also the direction I'll be going. Over the past year or so, I've gravitated towards ASUS for many of my needs such as monitors, DVD drives, ethernet cards, etc..

For lower cost routers I'll probably go with Netgear.

---pete----

[glc]

Pete, I'd even use Asus for lower cost routers. I've been burned by Netgear too many times.

Newegg.com - ASUS RT-N10+ IEEE Wireless Router EZ N 802.11b/g/n Support up to 4 SSID in Business (Open source DDWRT support)

[David M]

Let's hope Belkin does not buy out Corsair and Asus. Then we are screwed.

[Petef56]

Originally Posted by glc Pete, I'd even use Asus for lower cost routers. I've been burned by Netgear too many times. Newegg.com - ASUS RT-N10+ IEEE Wireless Router EZ N 802.11b/g/n Support up to 4 SSID in Business (Open source DDWRT support)

Thanks, I'll give it a try. ---pete---

[Tin]

Originally Posted by David M Let's hope Belkin does not buy out Corsair and Asus. Then we are screwed.

Youre always free to roll your own Linux or BSD based router.

[DOS_equis]

Originally Posted by glc That's going from bad to worse. My next router will be an Asus. Whatever I get will have to be DD-WRT compatible. Trendnet and TP-Link are decent cheapies, but I suspect some of them are actually made by Belkin.

The ASUS rt-n66u is rock solid for me. I have that one as my main router and also have a WRT54GL w/ DD-WRT bridged as a WiFi G access point. The ASUS router didn't seem to play nice with some G devices plus it slows it down when you have a N router set in mixed mode for G devices on the same channel. The ASUS router has 5GHz and 2.4 GHz regular network connections plus 6 guest networks (3 on each frequency).

Only semi bad thing to me is the external USB HDD connection. I hooked a 3TB drive in an enclosure to the USB formatted in GPT and it seemed to do OK but over time it started having partitioning table issues where video files started disappearing. The folders would still show up most of the time but the data was gone. The more I accessed the drive the worse it became. To be fair the router's firmware wasn't setup for that large of a drive (I think it is now on the current one) but it was a little annoying. I found this out the hard way but I didn't lose anything since I had copies of the missing files.


DOS_equis

[Tin]

Im currently running a D-Link DIR-825 with OpenWRT, stable as a rock. Ive never run it with the stock firmware, so I dont know how well it does in that respect, but with OpenWRT, its a Swiss Army knife of sorts. I only upgraded my WRT54GL due to some XBMC media centers I have strewn about the house. They couldnt do 1080p over G, so I had to upgrade to a N. A friend of mine talked me into the DIR-825, as hes had it now for 2 years and its been dead reliable for him. Even though the WRT54GL will be phased out, I see their WRT54G pre-v5 counterparts at garage sales quite regularly. The v4 and under have the exact same guts as the GL, just different firmware out of the box. I see them at garage sales quite often. Remember, it was released in 2002...people are upgrading these days.