Cisco Rumored To Be Selling Linksys 180
New submitter drdread66 writes "Cisco seems to be giving up on another technology acquisition. Hot on the heels of a full writedown for shuttering Flip Video, Cisco is now looking at another potentially huge loss from unloading Linksys."
Firmware (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good move. (Score:2, Informative)
I have a Linksys WRT120N.
It sucks fat cock. Wireless network fails on a daily basis and on two machines it never reconnects. Once a week, Wireless module goes down completely, I have to reset the router. About twice a month, my wired bandwidth slows to a crawl (10-50 kB/s) and I have to... you know... reset the router. And about every 6-7 weeks, my PPPoE "forgets" credentials, and I have to enter them again, and... you know... reset the router.
Furthermore, for the last 6 months I was unable to change large parts of router configuration, because every time I click Save, I receive a fat cock-sucking Error 500. For this one, resetting the router doesn't help.
The message I sent across to everybody I know was and is: Stay Away From Linksys.
Re:It's about time. (Score:3, Informative)
Admittedly, one of the reasons Cisco bought them was because so many people didn't need maximum-speed minimum-latency ASIC-based routing (and certainly not L3 switching) in an era when 32 bit CPUs were cheap enough for consumer gear; being able to remotely get a CLI on a device in another city and individually control ports; or even the plethora of different standards to link multiple offices. (A simple watchdog timer would have been nice in Linksys gear, though.) A good part of the price of Cisco gear can be justified simply by not having to travel multiple hours just to push a button to reboot something. A lot of very small companies didn't need that, which is why Cisco was scared enough of market erosion to buy them.. But your example shows just how bad it was to forcibly re-brand everything as Cisco.
I'm sure the reason Cisco did the rebranding was simply out of their habit of Acquire and Absorb. This worked for enterprise stuff that was a somewhat niche market when Cisco bought them, when the acquisition was a good fit for their switching/routing architecture. But Linksys wasn't enterprise stuff. And Cisco didn't understand consumer stuff. Or the consumer market.
And then there was the "red-headed stepchild" angle. I was a Cisco employee at the time of the acquisition. We couldn't even buy Linksys gear at a decent discount through the employee hardware purchase program. I wanted a Linksys 24-port gigabit switch to use at home. Guess who I bought it from? Dell.com had the best price, and it was easier to order, too.
Re:Good move. (Score:5, Informative)
I have a (refurbished) WRT150N, and have bought two others for parents/grandparents. With the stock firmware, they're everything you described. However, with DD-WRT, they've been some of the most reliable devices I've worked with, up to and including Cisco's enterprise hardware. I've had a similar experience with one of their newer models (E2000 or something? I forget the actual number) - ultimate crap with the stock firmware but excellent performance and reliability under DD-WRT.
Wait, did I miss something? (Score:4, Informative)
Hell, I'm still using a WRT54G from forever ago, and it's been online almost constantly (barring my tweaking and futzing up the install occasionally) since mid-2005. No slow-downs, no hiccups (not counting misconfigurations), etc, etc. And this is old old MIPS with 16MB RAM, guys. You know in the newer (WRT120N was mentioned above) hardware should at the very least perform as well as previous products, if not better. But it doesn't. Flash your firmware, and see the difference. Seriously. I'm sure if they cam pre-installed with something like Tomato, out-of-the-box, Linksys wouldn't have this weird brand identity crisis. But of course, Cisco and open-source are at polar opposites of the world, it seems. Also, WTF Slashdot? It's 2012, please get a WYSIWYG editor, instead of arcane HTML formatting and such. Line breaks.
Re:Good move. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure it's undergone minor revision changes since then, But I bet the bulk of the hardware and software remains unchanged since 2003.
Just a note, for the reference of anybody reading this: The WRT-54/GL is very similar to the wildly popular classic WRT-54G that put the 'WRT' in 'OpenWRT' and 'DD-WRT'. However, the WRT-54G(non L) has gone through something like 5 revisions, and the later ones are more or less entirely different animals in the same box. Less flash, less RAM, vxworks(yeah, like hell it works) based firmware, poor compatibility with anything but the most stripped down 3rd-party firmwares. In fact, the 'L' model was actually a re-release of the older revision designed to cater to the enthusiasts who had been alienated by the later revisions of the 54G.
If you go shopping, just be sure you know which is which. I don't know how the 54GL holds up against the newer models from non-linksys sources; but anything being sold as a WRT-54G(unless it specifically specifies one of the earlier, better revision numbers) is shit and probably not worth the money.