Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M(techcrunch.com) |
Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M(techcrunch.com) |
Apparently Cisco sold Linksys to Belkin in 2013. That's news to me.
Once upon a time, they made NICs.
I was in conversation with their customer service on the phone and it disconnected. Frustrated, cause it meant I had to call them back and there was no guarantee that I would get the same agent again, I gave up calling them. However, in 5 minutes, I got a call back from them - the same agent called me back and did manage to resolve my issue.
This was in India and prior to that, such service was unheard of (and not many still have that even today).
The device did not give me much trouble so I don't completely agree with the above.
I worked at Meraki, and institutionally we were deathly scared of dealing with that market; we were perfectly happy to stay in the enterprise market, where buyers were actually willing to pay for quality.
I don't know if they bought someone who knew what they were doing with power strips or what, but .... i'm still using them.
https://www.amazon.com/Belkin-12-Outlet-Protector-Protection...
My theory is that they are good because electrical safety is something that is actually regulated. UL and CE certification to sell as a consumer device. Whereas there is no penalty or regulation for shitty routers with shit firmware.
Their core competency is something innocuous like mousepads and power strips. Then they advance into more delicate and complicated electronics and the wheels fall off the wagon.
It reminds me of the early and mid-1980's when office supply companies decided that they should branch out from selling paper to making floppy disks. They were cheap, especially in bulk, but over time they had a much higher failure rate.
Eventually the only brands you could count on to work properly were BASF, 3M, Elephant Memory Systems, and IBM. (And probably a couple of others)
My main complaint with Belkin is that you don't have that option.
Other dongles for example randomly lost one of the color channels, had noisy output, occasionally flickered black or didn't work when waking up from sleep.
D-Link gear is hot garbage.
The OS on the ubnt edgerouter series is a fork of vyatta, which is Debian based.
Also for people who know what they are doing, a mikrotik rb3011 would be a good choice.
In the ski lodge, OpenWRT and a $20 TP-Link have uptime measured in years by now. OpenWRT is awesome.
The N generation like the RT-N12 is dirt cheap now. I deploy them in client offices and they have uptime measured in years.
It's not WiFi Ac and I don't care. It stays stable, has guest WiFi networks, and usable firmware.
We also used the previous version for older macbooks with thunderbolt and never had a problem with them.
"prosummer" brands
After a brief romance with VyOS and RPi based APs, Ubiquiti came along and swept me off my feet
Currently using their gear throughout a 300-ish person office. Easy to setup, no issues that weren’t our fault in the first place.
Great kit for startup and growing type situations
May be those numbers are Full time employees?
*And in case you are wondering if it is those foxconn robots taking jobs. No it is not. Not in any significant number.
My previous experience was with a router that would occasionally fail under load (e.g., torrents), requiring a restart. They sent a replacement for that, too, but I never found a use for an unreliable router.
I think there is a pretty good market for smart home accessories, various wifi enabled devices like powerstrips, lights, cameras, locks, alarm systems, etc. With Belkin's Walmart distribution network and their low costs, I think it may be something they could target well.
* an outlet multipler/usb charging thing - died
* lighting cables of various lengths - all died
maybe I have bad luck, but it seems to me like they are still making garbage.
Is it strange that this wasn’t blocked as well?
I think @yuhhaurlin works for Linksys, but I'm not sure.
Huh? I thought they manufacture iPhone chips and that's it. Now they buy peripherals because iphone itself won't make enough profit growth anymore to give top management the multi-million-dollar bonuses they are used to.
Also fun fact, nearly all routers use the same chips from Boardcom. The majority of differences between routers is just firmware and packaging, the guts are all the same.
The firmware is the part you really have to worry about, though. But the proper solution is to simply never run the vendor's firmware on a consumer grade router, because none of them are any good at assembling and securing a Linux distribution.
I'm not saying that Trump's executive order is justified (and the market predicted that Qualcomm would reject a hostile takeover attempt) but you have a few things wrong there.
1. The acquisition would be the other way around (as in Broadcom taking over Qualcomm)
2. Broadcom's parent company is a Singaporean entity. So yes, it's an American company but its parent company is Singaporean.
3. Broadcom's M&A strategy is very short sighted. It usually strips the acquisition target's R&D costs and improves its bottom line in the short term.
4. Qualcomm has a pseudo monopoly on mobile chips. All high end mobile phones use their chips. If it loses out on its future 5G technology due to a shrinking R&D budget, US loses its market dominance possibly for good.
But, doesn't Foxconn already manufacture a bunch of American products?
They also have a really good command line interface - which is lucky, because the biggest downside with the Ubiquitis is that some (generally more obscure and advanced) features can't be configured through the web UI.
The recommendation for the rb3011; or winbox and routerOS in general?
While it is not perfect. I do not know of other vendors with open docs like the mikrotik wiki[0].
With winbox, wiki, and not to bad cli. I feel it a good starting point for non network engineers. Better then horrible web interface or arcane cli interface.
Any recommendations for someone that want to learn to know what they are doing?
Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-Strait_relations
Companies like Google or Apple do a lot of work to integrate the existing software or hardware into their lineup (e.g. Google Voice, Google Doc, Siri, Siri music search)
https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_864
I personally had good experiences with TP-Link Archer C7 and GL Networks mini-routers.
They just don't understand it, they're not built to run it.
They spent a ton on flip during the rise of the smartphone. Every executive probabbly had a device in their pocket that would replace the company they were buying for crazy money.
My wife uses it every day at her internship where she has to record her patients for class and supervision. She isn't allowed to use a network connected device to do the recording for HIPAA compliance.
Flip filled a convenient niche for a few years until the 3GS came along with video support, after which it was useless for many consumers. This was the only reason I bought a Flip, and the only reason anyone else I know with one did.
Similarly, I think the first mainstream smartphones to record HD video wasn't until 2010. Again flip had a small window with their HD models before cellphones killed them again.
At least GoPro have (had?) a good story around their mounts and waterproofing, there was nothing in my opinion a Flip did that cellphones didn't very quickly do better.
Apple already knew people were buying and would continue to buy these things, and their innovation was just putting it all into one device. So you could buy a Garmin GPS and a Flip video camera, and end up spending $300-$500 total and carry 2 devices around, or you could just buy an iPhone 3GS for $199 and also make phone calls with it.
I'm still trying to figure out the $1,000 price tag of an iPhone nowadays however. Where is the substance behind that price? (And I own an iPhone, apple watch, iPad Pro, a Macbook Pro, and a Macbook air, so I really doo appreciate a good product, just can't comprehend the value proposition of a $1000 iPhone.)
Reminder:
> CE marking does not provide any specific information to the consumer. It is not a quality assurance declaration, it does not show evidence of third-party testing, and it should not be confused with any independent certification mark of the type issued by international or European notified test bodies.
Sorry for the hideous URL, but Anker absolutey does have UL certified power supplies. To my knowledge they're CCC compliant as I believe they're sold in China and as far as I cant tell, that's a requirement. TÜV I'm not so sure about, but I was under the impression they were more of an 3rd-party way to get CE certified (which Anker products already are).
I get being cautious about power supplies - but Anker is legitimate.
This was all while Skype pretty well established .... it was pure insanity.
Not using webEx was one of the things I actually looked forward to when I lost my last job. It's crazy that would occur to me.
People were still going to have mobile phone contracts. The smartphone replaced their cell phone just like it replaced their Garmin GPS and their Flip video camera and their pocket planner. It was a compelling proposition.
We use the Ubiquity Security Gateway Pro and have for over a year now issues with it's WAN Fallback. In the beginning it simply wouldn't Fallback at all, after lot's of Customer Service and three patches it actually did it's thing, but since then whenever the fallback happened our whole connection got instable until the USG is restarted. Once we even had issues because the USG thought WAN was down because it couldn't reach Ubiquity's Ping site (It was down) and so the connection started flip-flopping between two stable connections.
Besides that the Ubiquity Needle is now firmly stuck into the arm of our Admins and all the Network Gear we buy is from Ubiquity.
Most needed reboots as they’d stop working from time to time, many had flaxy Wifi or sudden long network lags for no reason, and the MicroTik even bricked itself requiring a reflash of the firmware.
Things might be different when it comes to enterprise gear.
I mean I was purposefully stress testing and can be a heavy user. Maybe it works fine for grandma doing some email and Facebook on an iPad
After great feels using it at work, setup Ubiquiti kit at home two years ago and only rebooted it when I decided to move the APs to improve signal coverage on the far end of our house.
For $100-ish an AP these days (my home units are the UniFi AP-AC Long Range on Amazon), I don’t see any reason to buy anything else
Wondering if things are better with newer hardware.
If raspberry Pi's CPU performance is absolutely necessary, use an Ethernet cable with WR810N.
It became rather untenable once that office hit ~30 people.
There were external factors that had us accepting defeat. Picked up some used Ruckus gear on the cheap, which helped but wasn’t that nice to use
Some of them obey the Law of Plastic Box: a device in a plastic box does one thing but not more than that. A Huawei router is OK if I just do routing, no WLAN, and put a TP-Link box as a WLAN beside it. Etc.
The only exceptions I have had in consumer-priced equipment is Ubiquity, which is great, and a small Finnish company called Telewell (which make cheap plastic things in China but strangely has never failed for me). The UI with Telewell is still the typical consumer-grade Web UI.
Edit: Needless to say, certifications are bullshit anyway, it's just a waiver for lawyers - Samsung Galaxy Note 7 had all possible certification, yet it was as more dangerous than any Anker product.
> > The majority of differences between routers is just firmware and packaging, the guts are all the same.
>
> The firmware is the part you really have to worry about, though
[1] https://blogs.cisco.com/wireless/not-all-802-11ac-aps-are-cr... [2] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-compu... [3] https://www.design-reuse.com/articles/20671/security-embedde...
[1] https://code.facebook.com/posts/843620439027582/facebook-ope... [2] https://github.com/facebook/fboss
The chassis may be open-source but the guts of that thing is a (high-end Broadcom chip, just like everyone else.
Much easier than flashing cell phone and the open source version normally has more features also.
I can imagine that you might have an unprivileged server presenting just the log-in page, then proxying to a privileged server that is started once the administrator is authenticated. But that doesn't get you much more security, and it probably does strain the resources of low-end routers. A small, auditable server may be better than a more complicated system, especially since it is trivial for more paranoid users to disable/uninstall the web server and just use SSH (which nobody seems to mind running as root).