Cisco's Robbins juggles tariffs, 'lumpy' service providers and 5G | Hacker News Reader

Cisco's Robbins juggles tariffs, 'lumpy' service providers and 5G

fiercetelecom.com

17 pointsoctosphere6 comments

The buried lede here is the desperation that built a subscription mandate. How long can the goose lay golden eggs before it's starved by competition that doesn't need monthly feeding?

"If you go back two years ago, we didn't have a single networking product with a software subscription on it," Robbins said. "And today, every product in the enterprise routing space, enterprise Wi-Fi space and the enterprise campus switching space is sold with a mandatory subscription."

Has anyone used these? Is it worth the money?

Ubiquiti is a major exception, and their products seem pretty good.

The whole enterprise wi-fi value proposition seems like it’s almost entirely software. A very expensive enterprise wi-fi AP is essentially identical to a home AP in a different case with less flashy antennas, a documented radiation pattern, and software that is designed to do something intelligent when you have a lot of them. The hardware differences should have negligible effect on cost.

Ubiquiti's Unifi Cloud Controller depends on MongoDB, which they won't help you with (having had MongoDB eat it multiple times on my Cloud Controller in the last year). The Intrusion Detection System/Deep Packet Inspection wrecks performance & throughput (and is pretty basic compared to eg: Watchguard), IPv6 is disabled by default, and no VLAN tagging on the WAN port means providers like Centurylink Fiber can't be used without an intermediate device between your Unifi Security Gateway and the Optical Network Terminal.

The Unifi suite is great for a small to medium business that is game to splash out $600 to $1500 (having the Unifi switch is critical to seamless VLAN tagging internally), but for homes and larger businesses or those with fast connections that want more than a basic router, the Unifi lineup doesn't have the grunt.

From a smallish amount of experience with Ubiquiti's gear, the Wi-Fi parts are far better than the Unifi Security Gateway. And you can certainly use them just fine without a USG.

I can only assume they'll be moving away from MongoDB soon, given the licensing situation. And the new Cloud Controller Gen 2 is considerably more reliable, which it achieves by the highly dubious hack of containing an internal UPS so that it is less likely to shut down uncleanly and thus die a horrible death.

The IPv6 situation is, indeed, embarrassing. But that, too, is solved by just not using a USG.

edit: None of this is particularly unique to Ubiquiti, IMO. By committing to using the same system or vendor for routing and for wi-fi, you make upgrades harder and you get stuck with feature sets you may not want. Home networks where the wi-fi is the cable modem or the wi-fi is the NAT/router box have the same problem, and it's even worse if you start using the same object for NAT/routing, wi-fi, smart home stuff, and NAS. Yuck. I wouldn't want to run an enterprise network where I've committed to using the same gear for routing and wi-fi.

It's a bit of shame that it's so hard to do a good job with wi-fi gear from multiple vendors, but getting things like fast roaming to work right is a huge pain without someone's proprietary management stack involved.

The "mandatory subscription" can be a 7 year software support SKU. It can also be "you can't purchase an edge switch without <subscription> even if you don't want to use it but when <subscription> is up you don't need to renew". This achieves 2 things: 1) it forces your customer base to try out the subscription stuff and see they like it (or some feature becomes more work to remove than pay for) 2) you get to say "we've sold <x> units of <software product> and have <y>% market penetration" in your marketing.

It's basically just the financial move not a change in anything that could be described in terms of "worth the money" from a customer perspective. Perhaps with the exception of the Meraki stuff but that model was bought in not developed new.

As far as other companies wi-fi and sd-wan offerings tend to come like this. It's basically outsourcing the main centralized point to "the cloud" which can have a lot of value, especially for smaller shops. Larger enterprises have even been hesitant with that though, preferring to stay on a long term capex based model.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com