I'm only a little sad about this. Linksys was my go-to for hackable wireless routers until I discovered Ubiquiti. Seriously, these guys make some awesome stuff.<p><a href="http://www.ubnt.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ubnt.com/</a><p>$80 will get you a legal-maximum 1000 mW transmitting, fully OpenWRT-compatible router with 8M flash, 32M RAM, a PoE injector, outdoor enclosure, mounting bracket, and a standard replaceable RP-SMA omni antenna.<p><a href="http://www.ubnt.com/picostation" rel="nofollow">http://www.ubnt.com/picostation</a>
This is horrible news. Linksys used to make some great consumer hardware; I still have a 4+ year old WRT54GL plugging happily along from college.<p>In contrast, I've never been satisfied with any Belkin product I've owned.
As the purchaser and support, either personally, or through family, roomates, co-workders, and one landlord, of no less than Fifteen Linksys WRT54G[L] in the last 10 years (with the obligatory OpenWRT Mods), and a network engineer/manager by occupation - I look forward to seeing if Belkin can come up with a <$200 router that reliably works for more than 3 years. I think I've seen about 50% failure rate in a 3 year period for those fifteen Linksys WRT54Gs, as compared to the dozen Cisco 2621s that I have reaching year ten w/ 0% mortality.<p>Yes - I realize that a $75 Consumer WAP is going to be less reliable than a $2000 commercial router, but I would hope, over time, someone would come up with a inexpensive, reliable, workhorse consumer router.<p>Now that Belkin is acquiring the Linksys name, maybe they'll deliver it.
Cisco neutered/limited the specs of Linksys WRT devices when they purchased Linksys so the offering wouldn't poach on their higher-end offerings. For instance the WRT54GS line used to have 32mb ram and 8mb flash and it was lowered to 16mb/2mb: source: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series#WRT54GS" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series#WRT54GS</a> under Cisco. There is huge potential for beefier hardware that can run open source linux or bsd in this area. Hopefully Belkin will see the market opportunity and start creating some affordable routers that are hackable and powerful running 802.11ac. They'd sell millions imho.
Sounds like a win for me, concentrating all the terrible products in one company. I have no idea how Belkin stays around, I assume its due to a 500% markup on cables or something.
Now we can expect huge unopenable packaging, price hikes, overheating and zero support from Linksys!<p>Belkin here in the UK used to sell 2m ethernet cables for £20 ( ~ $31).<p>For anyone who wants to bail out and get some decent kit, try Draytek: <a href="http://www.draytek.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.draytek.com/</a>
Cisco was always a poor fit for Linksys as they were scared of cannibalizing their own high-margin products. This market is getting hammered by TP-Link which provides consistently good quality products at low prices and many are DD-WRTable. Why buy a mid-range Linksys when you can get a very powerful Draytek et al with extra WAN ports and 3G backup for the same price?
Speculating that since the terms are not disclosed, they are not material to Cisco's earnings. That suggests they sold it for a lot less than the $500M they bought it for[1].<p>I wonder why they couldn't figure out how to make it work. I blew it by not working on NetApp's low end box (the Storvault) I really should have, it would have helped me understand where the sticky problems in 'consumer' are.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.twice.com/news/cisco-systems-buy-linksys-0" rel="nofollow">http://www.twice.com/news/cisco-systems-buy-linksys-0</a>
Maybe this explains why Cisco has neglected to fix the giant WPS security holes in their routers.<p>Reaver destroys WPS: <a href="https://code.google.com/p/reaver-wps/" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/reaver-wps/</a><p>Cisco's routers are mostly listed as "TBD" for when they will fix this: <a href="http://homekb.cisco.com/Cisco2/ukp.aspx?vw=1&articleid=25154" rel="nofollow">http://homekb.cisco.com/Cisco2/ukp.aspx?vw=1&articleid=2...</a>
My experience with Belking is: don't<p>Really, it's not "it's ok for your grandma", it's DON'T<p>Features not working, router freezing constantly, etc<p>So, too bad.
So if Belkin hasn't ever made good hardware, and Linksys hasn't made good hardware in a few years—what company <i>is</i> making solid consumer networking hardware at a decent price?<p>Legitimately curious.
In one of those "I have no way of knowing that it's true, but it's still almost certainly true" predictions: For the last 10 years:<p>- Cisco upper management has been yelling at the Linksys guys to add features and do things "the Cisco way".<p>- Linksys engineering has been subtly hinting back to the Cisco guys if they added those features and did things the Cisco way, a low end router would cost $1000.<p>And most of the best Linksys guys acquired either work for another division within Cisco or a different company altogether, because they saw the writing on the wall a long time ago.
does anyone know why Cisco sold Linksys? As far as I recall, Cisco wanted to enter the consumer market (as opposed to their enterprise presence).
Did they fail?<p>I like the fact that Cisco is not afraid of letting go stuff they acquired. Last time I heard was when they acquired tribe.net and later put it up for sale? correct me if I am wrong. And then there was the acquisition of Flip camera, that flopped (no pun intended).
Cisco focusing more and more on software and services. Interesting litmus test will be their hard VC and telepresence endpoints. Enterprise market and Cisco a leader...however Cisco knows future is soft clients, UC, video-enabled apps, services...how quick do they leap?