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I
had a chance to catch up with Patrick Lo, the CEO of Netgear this week. Last
year the networking company released 48 products and they are on track to do at
least that this year. The company will begin selling a new line of six gigabit
Ethernet switches this month.
The
takeaway from my interview with Lo is that Netgear is once again driving costs
down in a very impressive fashion, this time with an 8 switched gigabit port
product selling for less than $150 called the GS608. It wasn't too long ago
that we could get an 8-port shared 10BaseT hub for these prices and a gigE
switch cost hundreds of dollars per port. Netgear isn't alone: Linksys, Buffalo
Technology, and others have product at a similar price point.
Lo
mentioned that he is using two suppliers for his gigabit switches: Broadcom and
Marvell, and having two helps to drive costs for the chips down so he can keep
his own prices low too. The interesting thing about Marvell is that they are
serious about gigabit networking in a big way. The chip manufacturer recently
completed a company-wide upgrade of all of their desktops to gigabit Ethernet.
An impressive move, given that some of their wiring plant is too old or too
fragile to support gigE. Lo told me that Marvell's wiring was all category 5
but some of it was substandard and couldn't support the gigabit speeds. Sometimes,
the only way to find out is to really test each and every node. If you don't, you'll
have some PCs that won't be able to connect at the fastest settings.
What
distinguishes Netgear from the other lower-priced spreads is that they
announced six different gigE switches, including a 16-port one for $350 and a
24-port one for about $500. They will also sell managed switches, including one
with full SNMP support with 24 ports for $1000. At these prices, corporations
can begin to deploy gigE in droves.
The
issue, besides wiring, is to determine exactly what the real performance gains
will be with gigE. If you still have network bottlenecks, upgrading to a faster
network adapter and switch won't really solve your problem. It might also make
the bottleneck harder to find, given that you'll also need to upgrade your
tools to track these bottlenecks down to support gigE.
But
while it is great that Netgear continues to drive the costs of networking down,
any discussion of the company would be incomplete without mentioning some of
its missteps over the past year. In its rush to deliver dozens of new products,
Netgear has been plagued with a series of product quality issues that have hurt
the company's reputation. For example, last year I last wrote (in WI # 340) about
a series of mis-configured routers. The result was the University of
Wisconsin's network was flooded with network time requests. While they have
mostly resolved this issue, it is just sloppy programming that resulted in the
packet storm.
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/
And
earlier this summer the company got some knocks for allowing a very risky back
door in its WG602 wireless access points. Before closing the loophole
completely, the company offered a patch that did nothing more than changing the
username and password, still allowing access. Lo was very forthright in
admitting they made a mistake and blaming one of his engineers who forgot the
back door was in the code when the time came to release the router firmware to
the public. I am not sure that I would want to have this engineer still working
for my organization.
While
the company has created fixes for both products, there are plenty of routers
and access points that are still out in the world with the initial firmware
load, and these will continue to remain a problem until their users take on the
responsibility of upgrading them. Of course, vendors like Netgear and others
could make it easier for these upgrades to happen, without consumers having to
go through the pain of downloading and uploading the image and finding the
right configuration page to do the updates.
In
the meantime, I hope Netgear learns from these product quality blunders. Some
of their customers who have been burned aren't going to come back. As one of my
readers put it, "it takes quite a bit to turn my
opinion around after this sort of example of extreme cluelessness."
Entire contents copyright 2004 by David Strom, Inc.
David Strom, dstrom@cmp.com, +1 (516) 562-7151
Port Washington NY 11050
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