Cisco Exits the Consumer Market, Sells Linksys To Belkin 284
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."
Finally (Score:5, Informative)
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.
*sigh* (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. Belkin has been on my "do not buy" list ever since the spam router [theregister.co.uk] 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:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:*sigh* (Score:3, Informative)
There's Buffalo. Buffalo is pretty good, and some of their routers come with a variant of WRT already installed.
Re:WTB Cisco Switch (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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:buyers (Score:5, Informative)
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.