We moved office recently as some of you may know. We thought we’d treat ourselves to a professional grade broadband router more in keeping with our new surroundings.

We went with a Cisco 877 router thinking you can’t get more professional grade than Cisco. The only problem with it is that nobody around here can persuade it to work.

We’ve tried everything…software upgrades, support forums the works. It is still refusing to do anything useful. It is currently decorating the top of our server cabinet, lights a blinkin but doing nothing useful.

Anyway, this post isn’t intended to rubbish Cisco. It is more to compare and contrast my experience between our Cisco router with the Belkin router I recently installed for my parents. I doubt the Belkin took more than 5 minutes to set-up and most of that was getting it out of its box.

I suppose, in a £50 product you can’t afford the support requirements of a difficult to use product, but with a £300-400 product you can. In fact, you make your customers pay extra for support. We had to pay another £50 or so just to download some updated software.

Hard to see where Cisco’s motivation for making their products easier to use might come from.

Inch forward a bit, a bit more...

A start to 2007