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.
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.
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?
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.
