Typical is USA Today story, which follows the press release that the service is the company Cisco router first consumer, “despite having bought Linksys for years and sold tens of millions of commercial routers during that time . The service is the same size and probably similar depths with a new skin on top of it as the most modern models of Linksys.
Late in the story, USA Today reporter notes of the subsidiary Linksys, but have fallen in the line of marketing that the USB dongle that allows you to easily configure all devices is supposed somehow unique Cisco, the new and exciting. The real news, I suppose, is that the team that made Pure Digital Flip video recorder, acquired by Cisco, was thrown into the main line of networking products. But that’s not a revolution in the hardware, right?
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The idea of using a single USB drives (which comes with the device, necessarily) goes back several years Microsoft’s short-lived line of Wi-Fi, and some other companies – including Linksys! – They allow you to write settings to a USB drive to move to the computers. (Surprisingly, this support when the first version of the box for both Mac OS X and Windows!)
The idea of making Wi-Fi easy to configure data, oh, oh, 1999? And it is much easier. Six years ago, I wrote “The defeat of the blue wi-fi” PC World, which explains how to troubleshoot the Wireless Zero Configuration in Windows XP and other problems of the time.
At that time, about 35 percent of Wi-Fi routers purchased at retail were returned to stores. Cisco said that today’s number is about 20 percent. (Update: Cisco says it is an industry average, not his experience. ) This is closer to the rate of return for all peripherals of personal computers, but also explains why Cisco is trying to change the narrative without the need to offer something new or different, only one additional iteration of ongoing efforts throughout the sector since the beginning of Wi-Fi.