Belkin to buy Cisco

I just found this and can't believe what I'm hearing.....I've been partial to Cisco/Linksys products since I entered the network environment.

Cisco Exits The Consumer Market As It Sells Linksys To Belkin

I saw that too. I have a Linksys E3200 router right now and have used Linksys for a long time, before they were purchased by Cisco. I don't use Belkin products and do not recommend them to my clients as they are iffy at best.

I have used Linksys for a long time, recently switched to Netgear. So far I have not had any real issues other than large file transfers, but I had those issues on Linksys as well.

I don't recommend Belkin to anyone either. So this is sad news.

Your headline, "Belkin to buy Cisco," freaked me out. Then I read that they aren't buying Cisco, but just the Linksys group. That makes more sense. I prefer Netgear, but have used Cisco/Linksys. Hope Belkin doesn't ruin the Linksys products.

Ahhg - I like Linksys also, have an e4200 v2 router that is excellent. Hope Belkin don't mess it up.
Jim

rmeigs said:

Your headline, "Belkin to buy Cisco," freaked me out. Then I read that they aren't buying Cisco, but just the Linksys group. That makes more sense. I prefer Netgear, but have used Cisco/Linksys. Hope Belkin doesn't ruin the Linksys products.

Click to expand...

They will, like Oracle destroys everything they touch.

Belkin is a serious company. They should do well.

Man, that's too bad. I remember back in the day about all Belkin was known for was parallel printer and serial cables (dating myself ). Then they came out with a line of wireless routers that got pretty good reviews. I bought a couple, both crapped out after about a year within a week of each other. I usually lean towards Netgear but Linksys stuff isn't bad. Let's just hope if the deal goes through that they leave things alone and not try and fix something that isn't broken.

-jeff

Hi there

C'mon guys -- what's all the doom and gloom -- Linksys will continue to run just fine - why shouldn't it - actually most Belkin products I've used have been 100% OK -- they were excellent in getting unusual or hard to find adapters to work -- remember serial port (COM) and RS232 connected printers -- Belkin were one of the first to offer USB adapters for these when laptops came out without COM / Serial RS232 ports on them.

When Lenovo took over the IBM line of Thinkpads most people thought -- what a horrible idea -- now I know some people don't like them -- some people didn't like the original thinkpads either-- but the Lenovo brand has now achieved a decent following - and predictions of "It will be a disaster" haven't happened yet.

I don't have one BTW so I'm not being biased here.

I think some people just want to run down any product --why on earth would Belkin want to damage a decently performing brand.

CISCO isn't in any case really interested in consumer products any more -- it's an expensive "off-shoot" to its main corporate and "Backbone" type of stuff so getting rid of this division makes 100% sense to me. Don't forget also that things like domestic routers are being supplied more and more by Cable services who offer integrated phone / TV / broadband where possible so the market for "Stand alone Routers" is either relatively stable or a diminishing one and not worth a company like CISCO investing a lot of time and money in maintaining a service line that is totally different from its core products.

I'll bet the stock price moves quite favourably with this step.

Enc market chart of CSCO -- might have "peaked" for a while but trend is DEFINITELY upwards.

Cheers
jimbo

I worry about Belkin taking over Linksys. Because Belkin routers have such poor firmware and lack of adjustable settings in the firmware.

But it's not like the Cisco/Linksys relationship was working. Cisco's phenomenal hardware was way too expensive to go into Linksys routers. Contrary to the latest routers having Cisco prominently on the casing, it doesn't have Cisco guts. People gasp at $200+ routers already so you can imagine the heart attacks if they had Cisco guts in them.

The firmware for Linksys got better after Cisco came into the picture, but they had that fiasco with the cloud-based router management and forcing people to create accounts just to manage a router.

Wonders what this means for my Linksys WRT54G...that has been running non-stop for about 6 years with no updates, etc. It's not even running the Cisco firmware, it's got the old original Linksys stuff. That thing is unbelievably stable.

I thought everyone with the WRT54G upgraded to DD-WRT?

dirtyvu said:

I thought everyone with the WRT54G upgraded to DD-WRT?

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Nope, I have absolutely no need for it. Signal strength is fine, security is good enough, don't need QoS or any other fancier features.

I have used DD-WRT in the past when configuring cheapo routers and such for trade-shows when I need more power and flexibility, but I just need simple and stable at home.