Okay, so I’m browsing through articles over on Digg and I run across yet another “technician” wining about not being able to configure a router to do something. While that’s great, this is the third such article I’ve read wanging about how horrible “consumer grade” networking hardware is by someone that I suspect simply over-rates their ability.
Now, I’m not saying that all network hardware does all it says on the box. I know that throughput rates are often rated by what you’ll get if you hook a car battery up to the network device in question and count in all the TCP/IP packet-only bits.
But hey, when nothing you buy does what it says, I suspect one of two things. A) Problem exists between chair and display or B) you buy crap kit. Either one… not an endictment of the network market in general.
I’ve worked with Cisco kit (I’ve got a 5509 running a network in NYC, it’ll be at HOPE this year) and I’ve got mid-range Intel/Dell/3Com kit, and then I’ve got low end Linksys/D-Link/Buffalo stuff. Aside from the obvious stuff in the way it ques packets, most of the performance tweaking is done on the machines in question. There are several good guides to tweaking network performance on Linux, for instance.
So in conclusion, maybe there isn’t such a problem with the entirety of network equipment manufacturers. Just a thought.
The ripoff that is consumer-grade networking hardware | AllYourTech.com
