[TriLUG] No more Linux on WRT54G???

[Shane O'Donnell]

On 11/14/05, Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/14/05, Shane O'Donnell <shaneodonnell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > This sounds like a product manager or technical product marketing
> > guy's good idea (in conjunction with support teams, etc.), motivated
> > by support concerns and returns.
> >
> > I'd suspect that bricked WRT54Gs upped their number of returned
> > products, and returned products in the consumer space are a pure drag
> > on revenue.
>
> That's probably part of why they did it, although they could always
> reject warranty claims on boxes which had been loaded with unofficial
> firmware.
>

The issue isn't warranty claims, but rather boxes that are returned as
"dead" to retailers who accept them blindly and ship the box back to
Linksys for credit/refund.  There's no intelligent decision-logic in
that loop.

> The real reason may well have to do with the threat that Openwrt and
> the like pose to Ciscos business model, since lots of WRT54s with FOSS
> software replacements seem to be displacing more expensive Cisco boxen
> in commercial applications.
>

Could be, but I doubt it.  Sure there's some potential erosion there,
but certainly not as much as to other competitors.

IMHO, the Linksys product (even tweaked up with alternative firmware)
does not compare with the Cisco commercial grade products.  Specific
differences are in ease of use, reliability (especially under heavy
load), and certainly in manageability.  Of course, YMMV.

My two cents...

Shane O.
========
Shane O'Donnell
shaneodonnell at gmail.com
====================