Bloody LinkSys piece of @*!%

I'm not sure everyone looks to pay the least. When I bought the Netgear I set out to buy a device that would work as a firewall and wifi router. Sure it was quite cheap (around £80), but I presumed it would actually do what was described on the box. At that stage Netgear had a pretty decent reputation.

Ended up the device was based on a flawed design and promised features that were not actually implemented properly.

Take your £150 Draytek (incidentally as and when I replace the Netgear it will be with a Draytek), for the features it presents it's actually quite cheap at £150 compared to business products, so isnt really proving the point that you need to pay a lot to get something that appears to work.

Netgear's managed Gigabit switches for example - say around the £300-£400 mark - in theory they should work because you are paying more for "business class" device (Bear's tail anyone? ) with fewer features than a WiFi / router / switch / firewall / teasmade device yet, once again, turns out Netgear's managed switches are riddled with bugs - VLAN is badly implemented, IPsec is buggy - so it seems it's not an issue of cost. Similar stories emerge with 3COM, Dell and others (on the subject of managed Layer 2 switches).

The point I'm making is there are lots of "big name" companies making shoddily built, poorly tested, under developed devices in an attempt to meet the fast changing demands of the market and the price tag isnt a clear indication of anything. It's an issue of quality not price for me and I find it extremely frustrating.

bit tangential, but on the subject of Layer 2 and Layer 3 switch devices we found HP ProCurve pretty much the only realistic (and MUCH cheaper) alternative to Cisco.