> You probably know Belkin for its various lines of accessories, peripherals, and assorted consumer electronics; Linksys, surely the most recognizable router brand, is a subsidiary.
Apparently Cisco sold Linksys to Belkin in 2013. That's news to me.
Cisco had money burning a hole in their pocket and bought a some consumer stuff and then had no idea what to do with it ... so they sold most of it off, or simply discontinued it (like flip video).
That's Cisco's R&D model. Buy smaller companies with interesting tech and see if their products stick. If they do, great. If not, spit them out via sale or shut them down.
The parent commenter is saying that Cisco essentially doesn't do much outside of the acquisition.
Companies like Google or Apple do a lot of work to integrate the existing software or hardware into their lineup (e.g. Google Voice, Google Doc, Siri, Siri music search)
Yup, they took their corporate video conferencing products and tried to make a consumer version (Umi I think it was) that while cheaper than the cooperate product were still absurdly expensive.
This was all while Skype pretty well established .... it was pure insanity.
Oh man WebEx is crazy clunky software. I used it regularly for years and never got comfortable with it ... let alone that it ran in fits and starts for everyone.
Not using webEx was one of the things I actually looked forward to when I lost my last job. It's crazy that would occur to me.
Had to use WebEx on a client call once. Had to install two different packages because audio was "provided by Comcast". It was the only time ever that I saw the video, but couldn't get audio, so a coworker had to update me on Slack in real time so I knew what I was watching. Horrible.
Generally speaking Cisco has largely blown the whole consumer business... repeatedly.
They just don't understand it, they're not built to run it.
They spent a ton on flip during the rise of the smartphone. Every executive probabbly had a device in their pocket that would replace the company they were buying for crazy money.
I still use my flip. It's my favorite little camcorder.
My wife uses it every day at her internship where she has to record her patients for class and supervision. She isn't allowed to use a network connected device to do the recording for HIPAA compliance.
I think the bigger problem was cellphones, especially the iPhone, gaining the ability to record decent video.
Flip filled a convenient niche for a few years until the 3GS came along with video support, after which it was useless for many consumers. This was the only reason I bought a Flip, and the only reason anyone else I know with one did.
Similarly, I think the first mainstream smartphones to record HD video wasn't until 2010. Again flip had a small window with their HD models before cellphones killed them again.
At least GoPro have (had?) a good story around their mounts and waterproofing, there was nothing in my opinion a Flip did that cellphones didn't very quickly do better.
This is true. I think the iPhone did the same thing to Garmin GPS and other single-purpose hardware companies. They all lost so much of their market.
Apple already knew people were buying and would continue to buy these things, and their innovation was just putting it all into one device. So you could buy a Garmin GPS and a Flip video camera, and end up spending $300-$500 total and carry 2 devices around, or you could just buy an iPhone 3GS for $199 and also make phone calls with it.
I'm still trying to figure out the $1,000 price tag of an iPhone nowadays however. Where is the substance behind that price? (And I own an iPhone, apple watch, iPad Pro, a Macbook Pro, and a Macbook air, so I really doo appreciate a good product, just can't comprehend the value proposition of a $1000 iPhone.)
The only good Belkin product I have ever seen is their 12 outlet power strip. As a network engineer everything they make with an Ethernet/wifi interface is complete shit. But this is not really news, D-Link, Netgear, many of their competitors are also junk.
I did not have any issues with their router. But that's not what I remember Belkin for:
I was in conversation with their customer service on the phone and it disconnected. Frustrated, cause it meant I had to call them back and there was no guarantee that I would get the same agent again, I gave up calling them. However, in 5 minutes, I got a call back from them - the same agent called me back and did manage to resolve my issue.
This was in India and prior to that, such service was unheard of (and not many still have that even today).
The device did not give me much trouble so I don't completely agree with the above.
That's kind of the curse of the consumer market. When it comes to that kind of appliance, consumers care about sticker price above all. It's a brutal race to the bottom.
I worked at Meraki, and institutionally we were deathly scared of dealing with that market; we were perfectly happy to stay in the enterprise market, where buyers were actually willing to pay for quality.
My theory is that they are good because electrical safety is something that is actually regulated. UL and CE certification to sell as a consumer device. Whereas there is no penalty or regulation for shitty routers with shit firmware.
Yup that is it, the other models are pretty capable too. I like your theory, that makes sense. Guys behind the power strips can pull the old "Nope can't cheap out here, there are standards!" While the guys working on the POS USB hub or dongle or whatever can't say the same.
> UL and CE certification to sell as a consumer device.
Reminder:
> CE marking does not provide any specific information to the consumer. It is not a quality assurance declaration, it does not show evidence of third-party testing, and it should not be confused with any independent certification mark of the type issued by international or European notified test bodies.
That’s not entirely correct. The CE Mark is a representation by the manufacturer / authorised representative that the device conforms to all relevant European directives, including the electrical safety ones (which typically require additional marks and third party verification).
I think it's something of a natural progression with accessory companies.
Their core competency is something innocuous like mousepads and power strips. Then they advance into more delicate and complicated electronics and the wheels fall off the wagon.
It reminds me of the early and mid-1980's when office supply companies decided that they should branch out from selling paper to making floppy disks. They were cheap, especially in bulk, but over time they had a much higher failure rate.
Eventually the only brands you could count on to work properly were BASF, 3M, Elephant Memory Systems, and IBM. (And probably a couple of others)
Well, the only Thunderbolt 2 to HDMI adapter I've used that actually worked well (and I tried 2 others .. they're expensive too, I must have spent ~$150 in the process) was the Belkin ones. The others didn't, for whatever reason, work when both Thunderbolt 2 ports were in use and the internal display was also turned on (on my '14 MBP).
Other dongles for example randomly lost one of the color channels, had noisy output, occasionally flickered black or didn't work when waking up from sleep.
I actually got good mileage out of Netgear stuff, but two years ago I changed it out with an ASUS Router (AC66U) and I've been happy. They originally weren't aggressive with security flaws, but they've righted the ship on that.
Separate the function of wifi and router. My home office, which is bottlenecked by the docsis3.0 last mile, is on a Ubiquiti edgerouter-x ($46) router. And then a single ubnt UAP-AC 2X2 MIMO, dual band 802.11ac AP ($79).
The OS on the ubnt edgerouter series is a fork of vyatta, which is Debian based.
Also for people who know what they are doing, a mikrotik rb3011 would be a good choice.
I've generally found the Ubiquiti hardware to be a fair bit better than Mikrotik stuff (way better forwarding speeds with the accelerated Cavium processors in the EdgeRouters - except the ER-X, which doesn't have the hardware offload but is still useful). I find their web UI far less confusing too. I know some guys who have used Mikrotiks a lot and swear by it, but unless you're already experienced with Mikrotik interfaces I'd recommend the Ubiquiti.
They also have a really good command line interface - which is lucky, because the biggest downside with the Ubiquitis is that some (generally more obscure and advanced) features can't be configured through the web UI.
The recommendation for the rb3011; or winbox and routerOS in general?
While it is not perfect. I do not know of other vendors with open docs like the mikrotik wiki[0].
With winbox, wiki, and not to bad cli. I feel it a good starting point for non network engineers. Better then horrible web interface or arcane cli interface.
Any recommendations for someone that want to learn to know what they are doing?
Asus+Merlin firmware is what I am running now. Stable, with enough features included out of the box. Compared to the bundled horror from the TelCo I get nearly 3x wifi performance on -ac.
In the ski lodge, OpenWRT and a $20 TP-Link have uptime measured in years by now. OpenWRT is awesome.
Netgate router board with a mSATA drive and PFSense for the router. Ubiquiti APs for wireless. Run the Ubiquiti unifi software from a Docker image on your workstation or home server. Cisco SG-nnn series switches.
The worst router I’ve ever seen was a D-Link. I was in a position where I had to provide support for it, and in the end I gave up and bought them an ASUS with my own money. It ended up being worth it, just in terms of time and aggravation saved. The software and firmware on the D-Link were garbage, and so was the actual build.
I stopped using D-Link equipment after I had to work with an IP camera that would choke on the cron'ed FTP upload if the server welcome message had more than three lines. Fewer than three lines and everything was great. But when it tired to upload to a server that responded with more than three lines and the camera ate itself.
We use the Ubiquity Stuff and are also mostly happy, but it's not really as Enterprise-Grade as it tries to sell itself as.
We use the Ubiquity Security Gateway Pro and have for over a year now issues with it's WAN Fallback. In the beginning it simply wouldn't Fallback at all, after lot's of Customer Service and three patches it actually did it's thing, but since then whenever the fallback happened our whole connection got instable until the USG is restarted. Once we even had issues because the USG thought WAN was down because it couldn't reach Ubiquity's Ping site (It was down) and so the connection started flip-flopping between two stable connections.
Besides that the Ubiquity Needle is now firmly stuck into the arm of our Admins and all the Network Gear we buy is from Ubiquity.
Yikes that is poor, you'd think they'd have at least a few big sites (not all on aws either) to validate connectivity problems against, or at least make it configurable. Doesn't Google have a connectivity validation site on an anycast ip replicate across their global DCs?
Haven’t had a single issue with my Ubiquiti AP in 2 years. None of the other consumer-grade APs even came close, I had issues with all of them (Netgear, Linksys/Cisco, AVM, Zyxel, TP-Link, MicroTik, even Apple Airport), and I wasn’t buying the lowend models either.
Most needed reboots as they’d stop working from time to time, many had flaxy Wifi or sudden long network lags for no reason, and the MicroTik even bricked itself requiring a reflash of the firmware.
Things might be different when it comes to enterprise gear.
Yup, every piece of “home user” gear I’ve tried has needed regular reboots, or failed in ~24 months.
I mean I was purposefully stress testing and can be a heavy user. Maybe it works fine for grandma doing some email and Facebook on an iPad
After great feels using it at work, setup Ubiquiti kit at home two years ago and only rebooted it when I decided to move the APs to improve signal coverage on the far end of our house.
For $100-ish an AP these days (my home units are the UniFi AP-AC Long Range on Amazon), I don’t see any reason to buy anything else
What was your experience with Raspberry Pi APs? I set one up for Americans traveling abroad on the original Pi B model and couldn’t get any reliability for the life of me. The VPN constantly broke down because of WiFi sleep issues.
Wondering if things are better with newer hardware.
Raspberry Pis are horrible for that use case. I would suggest getting something like a TP-link WR810N or something from GL-inet if want a larger flash.
If raspberry Pi's CPU performance is absolutely necessary, use an Ethernet cable with WR810N.
Indeed. I've had more failures than I can tolerate with Belkin, Linksys, D-Link, Zyxel, TP-Link, Asus, ZTE, Huawei. They all tire up eventually - even if they work initially, the equipment runs hot and fails in a few months.
Some of them obey the Law of Plastic Box: a device in a plastic box does one thing but not more than that. A Huawei router is OK if I just do routing, no WLAN, and put a TP-Link box as a WLAN beside it. Etc.
The only exceptions I have had in consumer-priced equipment is Ubiquity, which is great, and a small Finnish company called Telewell (which make cheap plastic things in China but strangely has never failed for me). The UI with Telewell is still the typical consumer-grade Web UI.
Almost all are factory employees assembling iPhones and the like. Not sure if I would consider that IT employment like a lot of the others on that list (Amazon's is also inflated quite a bit with warehouse and retail/grocery staff).
Foxconn is Taiwanese like Asus, Acer, Gigabyte, MSI, MediaTek, D-Link, and HTC. Both Asus and D-Link are major router makers as well.
Also fun fact, nearly all routers use the same chips from Boardcom. The majority of differences between routers is just firmware and packaging, the guts are all the same.
> The majority of differences between routers is just firmware and packaging, the guts are all the same.
The firmware is the part you really have to worry about, though. But the proper solution is to simply never run the vendor's firmware on a consumer grade router, because none of them are any good at assembling and securing a Linux distribution.
> > The majority of differences between routers is just firmware and packaging, the guts are all the same.
>
> The firmware is the part you really have to worry about, though
Professional quality routers often use ASICs to handle most of the processing, which is quite a bit faster, engineered to perform at specific workloads, and is more reliable. [1] Big iron gear are often specialized versions of blade servers. [2] And tons of software controls go into the CPU and software design to protect against firmware hacks, reverse-engineering, data exfiltration, counterfeit parts, insecure connections, license tampering, and hardening against internal compromise. [3] Aside from the CPUs and other guts inside the router, newer Cisco gear supports network adapters from Broadcom, Intel and QLogic.
You can see an open source version of "big iron" networking gear, both hardware [1] and software [2]. They also use ASICs for most of the work and run Linux on the host CPU (so they can be managed like normal servers).
I don't think Belkin/Linksys operates in those market segments. It doesn't appear that they have any rackmount routers at the moment, just a tiny VPN router and some rackmount Ethernet switches. The rest is WiFi routers that are unlikely to have any significant hardware acceleration beyond a built-in Ethernet switch with basic NAT capability. There's not much separation between data plane and control plane in those products.
OpenWRT is still trying to support devices with 8MB of storage, so they can't go overboard and start incorporating Docker or anything like that. But some services do run as separate users: on my routers, dnsmasq and avahi aren't running as root. What other services would you like to see isolated?
Right? I know it's not completely analogous, but the federal government blocks a US company (Qualcomm) from buying another American company (Broadcom) over concerns about the Chinese somehow (which I still don't fully understand), but allows a Taiwanese company to buy an American network hardware division? I guess the government doesn't give a shit about consumer products.
> the federal government blocks a US company (Qualcomm) from buying another American company (Broadcom) over concerns about the Chinese somehow (which I still don't fully understand)
I'm not saying that Trump's executive order is justified (and the market predicted that Qualcomm would reject a hostile takeover attempt) but you have a few things wrong there.
1. The acquisition would be the other way around (as in Broadcom taking over Qualcomm)
2. Broadcom's parent company is a Singaporean entity. So yes, it's an American company but its parent company is Singaporean.
3. Broadcom's M&A strategy is very short sighted. It usually strips the acquisition target's R&D costs and improves its bottom line in the short term.
4. Qualcomm has a pseudo monopoly on mobile chips. All high end mobile phones use their chips. If it loses out on its future 5G technology due to a shrinking R&D budget, US loses its market dominance possibly for good.
46% of Foxconn revenue comes from Apple (they manufacture iPhones) also Kindles, Xbox, PlayStation 4, Wii U, BlackBerries, lots of of Google's hardware, many Cisco's routers etc.
Just today I contacted Belkin live support for a usb-c gigabit Ethernet adapter that stopped working 1 month in. They are shipping me a replacement.
My previous experience was with a router that would occasionally fail under load (e.g., torrents), requiring a restart. They sent a replacement for that, too, but I never found a use for an unreliable router.
Neat. Belkin was pretty crap about 7 years or so ago but they raised their game I find in the last couple years. They are pretty solid with decent prices now.
I think there is a pretty good market for smart home accessories, various wifi enabled devices like powerstrips, lights, cameras, locks, alarm systems, etc. With Belkin's Walmart distribution network and their low costs, I think it may be something they could target well.
Sorry for the hideous URL, but Anker absolutey does have UL certified power supplies. To my knowledge they're CCC compliant as I believe they're sold in China and as far as I cant tell, that's a requirement. TÜV I'm not so sure about, but I was under the impression they were more of an 3rd-party way to get CE certified (which Anker products already are).
I get being cautious about power supplies - but Anker is legitimate.
Process of certification is heavy on cash, need some weird certifications? Price of products will increase and customers will be hurt as a result (just to make some minor portion of customers happy).
I don't buy it. As long as their products aren't certified, I won't buy them. Besides when you look at the reviews on Amazon, some of their chargers allegedly catch fire or start to smell like burning plastic...
foxconn makes routers for all the vendors I think, e.g. dlink.netgear,belkin...now Belkin might push its competitors away from Foxconn's assembly lines
Did they ever make meaningful contributions? I recall when they first revived the WRT branding, they promised open-source support for the Marvell chipsets they were now using, but it took an extremely long time for any code to show up, and it was far from being in a state to upstream. I haven't paid close attention since then, but I don't recall running across any mention that Linksys was directly helping improve the open-source Marvell drivers.
> best known for manufacturing practically everything in the world
Huh? I thought they manufacture iPhone chips and that's it. Now they buy peripherals because iphone itself won't make enough profit growth anymore to give top management the multi-million-dollar bonuses they are used to.
Apparently Cisco sold Linksys to Belkin in 2013. That's news to me.