What should we care about in a home router to select the best for us?

On 11/2/19 10:35 AM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
snip

Wrong. As Dan Purgert mentioned, Linksys is now owned by Belkin. Like
the "Linksys by Cisco" brand, Belkin has kept the Linksys brand name
independent. Last year, Foxconn bought Wemo, Belkin and Linksys:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/foxconn-subsidiary-buys-belkin-linksys-and-wemo-for-866-million/
I haven't seen any changes on the older products, but the new stuff
all looks like it was built by Foxconn.

I was wrong about whom purchased whom, but not regarding the guts of the
hardware. During the days of Linksys-Cisco they were selling smaller biz
class switches that were identical to each other. Right down to the
screws holding the damn things together. The only difference was the price.


For a clue as to how Belkin and Linksys now operate, check the dates
of the latest firmware updates on older routers. In general, Belkin
releases one or maybe two firmware updates after the product is
released, and none after it has been discontinued. This is in
contrast to early Linksys, and possibly Linksys by Cisco, issuing
security updates after a product is no longer shipping. However, I
got tired of leaving my customers home routers with known security
problems, where the usual solution was to buy a new router. So, I
spent years dabbling in Open Source firmware, which has the opposite
problem. Firmware updates were appearing far too often. Can't win.

That's why I'm a big Mikrotik fan. I'm still getting firmware updates
for some of the earliest hardware, of theirs, that I purchased. I'm not
sure if anything of theirs, that I have purchased, has ever been EOL'ed
on updates.

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Johann Beretta wrote:
On 11/2/19 6:10 AM, Dan Purgert wrote:
snip

Cisco bought Linksys (not the other way around), and has since sold
them off to (IIRC) Belkin.
snip

Doh! You are absolutely correct. I don't know why I thought it was the
other way around.. Nevertheless there's a lot of Cisco gear out there

Probably a lack of caffeine.

that is screw-for-screw identical with Linksys hardware (switches in
particular). Of course there's a different logo on the case and the
price is a lot higher. But I'd be surprised if they weren't identical
down to the circuit pathways.

They were similar; but really there's only so much difference you can
make between a "budget Cisco" and a "high end Linksys" that the
similarity isn't exactly astonishing - especially the screws, etc. One
box with a different sticker is a LOT cheaper to make than two boxes.

That being said, it's a bit hard to tell if it was ultimately a
"cheapening" of the Cisco budget lines, or an "improving" of the
Linksys. Or at least I don't have enough representative samples to make
a call one way or the other.

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On Sun, 3 Nov 2019 20:09:11 -0800, Johann Beretta
wrote:

On 11/2/19 10:35 AM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
snip

Wrong. As Dan Purgert mentioned, Linksys is now owned by Belkin. Like
the "Linksys by Cisco" brand, Belkin has kept the Linksys brand name
independent. Last year, Foxconn bought Wemo, Belkin and Linksys:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/foxconn-subsidiary-buys-belkin-linksys-and-wemo-for-866-million/
I haven't seen any changes on the older products, but the new stuff
all looks like it was built by Foxconn.

I was wrong about whom purchased whom, but not regarding the guts of the
hardware. During the days of Linksys-Cisco they were selling smaller biz
class switches that were identical to each other. Right down to the
screws holding the damn things together. The only difference was the price.

You're probably correct about the switches. Cisco was a company known
for growing by acquisition.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/corporate-strategy-office/acquisitions/acquisitions-list-years.html
They had a very consistent and functional method of integrating any
company they purchase into the Cisco conglomeration of companies. For
some reason, that didn't quite work when Cisco purchased Linksys.
Linksys was never really integrated into Cisco. My guess(tm) is that
Cisco didn't know what to do with a company that sold consumer
products as everything else they did was industrial or business
oriented. To the best of my knowledge, the Tsao family continued to
run Linksys in the same manner both before and after acquisition by
Cisco.

Between the Cisco purchase in 2003 and the sale to Belkin in 2013, the
company tried various experiments, one of which was an extension of
its previous of taking an existing successful product, maintaining the
packaging, appearance, product name, and other customer facing
characteristics while making radical changes to the internals, which
the customer never sees. For example, the popular WRT54G series of
routers had 9 (or more) variations, all of which looked much the same
externally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series
There were also some thinly disguised attempts to capitalize on the
WRT54G reputation by attaching subtle variations of the model number
onto not so wonder similar products. Any semblance of attempting to
confuse the buyer is strictly coincidental. This was not exactly the
Cisco way of doing business. However, there was a really good reason
for doing some of this. Whenever Linksys would introduce a new
product, dealers would see sales of the current products plunge,
causing the value of their inventory to crash. To reduce this effect,
making the new and improved version look almost identical to the
previous version, allowed the dealer to continue to sell the old
routers on the assumption that customers wouldn't know the difference.
Before anyone declares that this is evil trickery, please note that
this had been standard practice in the auto industry for a long time.

Anyway, I suspect that network switches may have been handled in a
similar manner. I don't track such things and really don't know if
this happened to any Cisco/Linksys switches.

For a clue as to how Belkin and Linksys now operate, check the dates
of the latest firmware updates on older routers. In general, Belkin
releases one or maybe two firmware updates after the product is
released, and none after it has been discontinued. This is in
contrast to early Linksys, and possibly Linksys by Cisco, issuing
security updates after a product is no longer shipping. However, I
got tired of leaving my customers home routers with known security
problems, where the usual solution was to buy a new router. So, I
spent years dabbling in Open Source firmware, which has the opposite
problem. Firmware updates were appearing far too often. Can't win.

That's why I'm a big Mikrotik fan. I'm still getting firmware updates
for some of the earliest hardware, of theirs, that I purchased. I'm not
sure if anything of theirs, that I have purchased, has ever been EOL'ed
on updates.

Good to know that they continue the practice. I once worked for a
marine radio company that would honor the warranty on any product it
made from the day it was founded. After 15 years, that became a
problem, yet management insisted that the practice continue even
though old parts were becoming difficult to find. I didn't
understand, so one day, I accosted the company president in the
hallway and asked for an explanation. He indicated that their largest
customers would stop buying these radios if they even suspected that
they might in some way considered obsolete or not-repairable. It's
like that with any small company, which I suspect includes Mikrotik.
If they can't compete on the basis of price, and the products are
largely the same thanks to regulatory restrictions, then providing an
extra service that the larger companies would find wasteful and
expensive is a good solution.

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558