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

[Johann Beretta]

<snip>

<snip>

MikroTik all the way.

Cisco routers, most likely, contain Linksys guts now that Linksys is the parent company. In fact I can prove that some of the models do. Cisco is a joke of a company anymore. I remember when they were the BIG dog on the block and set standards out of sheer market dominance. I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of the big routers on the 'net, in the 90's, were Cis= co.

[Dan Purgert]

[Jeff Liebermann]

No, not all the way. Maybe part way. My problem with Mirotik is the licensing ordeal and costs. I've had some issues with costs, transfers, replacement keys, and license failures in the distant past. I haven't sold any Mikrotik for about 5 years, so things might have improved.

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:

I haven't seen any changes on the older products, but the new stuff all looks like it was built by Foxconn.

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.

[Clare Snyder]

The one I will NOT install is D-Link. Their "industrial strength" stuff may be half decent but their commodity grade stuff is JUNK

[Johann Beretta]

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

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 pric= e.

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.

[Clare Snyder]

Netgear stuff is pretty good in my experience. In the low end, TLink is good for the price - very similar to Belkin in quality. When Cisco owned LinkSys some Linksys stuff was sold as Cisco, and some Cisco was sold as Linksys.Overpriced with the Cisco name - mabee also in LinkSys.

[Xeno]

Yeah, they pronounced it incorrectly in the song. They do that a lot!

[Cindy Hamilton]

Did he? Really? That is so lame.

It makes me feel downright joyful that I scroll past his windy posts.

Cindy Hamilton

[Jeff Liebermann]

You're probably correct about the switches. Cisco was a company known for growing by acquisition.

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.

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.

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.