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Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

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Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#61

Post by oneweekwonder »

walrus01 wrote: post #33
fro0116 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any recommendations for alternatives?

Separate the function of wifi and router. My home office, which is bottlenecked by the docsis3.0 last mile, is on a Ubiquiti edgerouter-x ($46) router. And then a single ubnt UAP-AC 2X2 MIMO, dual band 802.11ac AP ($79). 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.

> Also for people who know what they are doing

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?

[0]: https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Main_Page

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#62

Post by Roritharr »

ieo2929 wrote: post #20
cctt23 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst router I’ve ever seen was a D-Link. I was in a position where I had to provide support for it, and in the end I gave up and bought them an ASUS with my own money. It ended up being worth it, just in terms of time and aggravation saved. The software and firmware on the D-Link were garbage, and so was the actual build.

Ubiquiti ftw 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

We use the Ubiquity Stuff and are also mostly happy, but it's not really as Enterprise-Grade as it tries to sell itself as.

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.

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#63

Post by jmiserez »

ieo2929 wrote: post #20
cctt23 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst router I’ve ever seen was a D-Link. I was in a position where I had to provide support for it, and in the end I gave up and bought them an ASUS with my own money. It ended up being worth it, just in terms of time and aggravation saved. The software and firmware on the D-Link were garbage, and so was the actual build.

Ubiquiti ftw 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

Haven’t had a single issue with my Ubiquiti AP in 2 years. None of the other consumer-grade APs even came close, I had issues with all of them (Netgear, Linksys/Cisco, AVM, Zyxel, TP-Link, MicroTik, even Apple Airport), and I wasn’t buying the lowend models either.

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.

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#64

Post by draugadrotten »

fro0116 wrote: post #31
walrus01 wrote: post #16

The only good Belkin product I have ever seen is their 12 outlet power strip. As a network engineer everything they make with an Ethernet/wifi interface is complete shit. But this is not really news, D-Link, Netgear, many of their competitors are also junk.

Do you have any recommendations for alternatives?

Asus+Merlin firmware is what I am running now. Stable, with enough features included out of the box. Compared to the bundled horror from the TelCo I get nearly 3x wifi performance on -ac.

In the ski lodge, OpenWRT and a $20 TP-Link have uptime measured in years by now. OpenWRT is awesome.

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#65

Post by aetherspawn »

walrus01 wrote: post #16

The only good Belkin product I have ever seen is their 12 outlet power strip. As a network engineer everything they make with an Ethernet/wifi interface is complete shit. But this is not really news, D-Link, Netgear, many of their competitors are also junk.

Well, the only Thunderbolt 2 to HDMI adapter I've used that actually worked well (and I tried 2 others .. they're expensive too, I must have spent ~$150 in the process) was the Belkin ones. The others didn't, for whatever reason, work when both Thunderbolt 2 ports were in use and the internal display was also turned on (on my '14 MBP).

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.

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#66

Post by stephen_g »

walrus01 wrote: post #33
fro0116 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any recommendations for alternatives?

Separate the function of wifi and router. My home office, which is bottlenecked by the docsis3.0 last mile, is on a Ubiquiti edgerouter-x ($46) router. And then a single ubnt UAP-AC 2X2 MIMO, dual band 802.11ac AP ($79). 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.

I've generally found the Ubiquiti hardware to be a fair bit better than Mikrotik stuff (way better forwarding speeds with the accelerated Cavium processors in the EdgeRouters - except the ER-X, which doesn't have the hardware offload but is still useful). I find their web UI far less confusing too. I know some guys who have used Mikrotiks a lot and swear by it, but unless you're already experienced with Mikrotik interfaces I'd recommend the Ubiquiti.

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.

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#67

Post by Tepix »

walrus01 wrote: post #39
chx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UL and CE certification to sell as a consumer device. 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.

You are absolutely right. I meant the TÜV test mark for Europe. I'm more familiar with us-canada stuff. https://www.esasafe.com/electricalproducts/marks

There's also the CCC mark for the Chinese market.

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#68

Post by Tepix »

srcmap wrote: post #25
wtallis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Just check if they are compatible with dd-wrt or openwrt and flash it with opensource build. Much easier than flashing cell phone and the open source version normally has more features also.

It's such a shame that when using OpenWRT everything runs as root...

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#69

Post by Tepix »

walrus01 wrote: post #29
canthonytucci wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

last belkin items I had were: * 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.

If you want good quality third party chargers and USB cables - buy Anker

If Anker is so great, why don't they have TÜV/CCC/UL certified power supplies?

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#70

Post by callmekatootie »

walrus01 wrote: post #16

The only good Belkin product I have ever seen is their 12 outlet power strip. As a network engineer everything they make with an Ethernet/wifi interface is complete shit. But this is not really news, D-Link, Netgear, many of their competitors are also junk.

I did not have any issues with their router. But that's not what I remember Belkin for:

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.

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