Cisco to cease Linksys branding

The CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, has told members of the European press that the company soon intends to eliminate the Linksys name. Speaking at a roundtable event, Chambers said that the Linksys brand had reached "end of life," and would gradually be replaced by new consumer products bearing a redesigned Cisco motif. "It will all come overtime into a Cisco brand," Chambers said. "The reason we kept Linksys' brand because it was better known in the US than even Cisco was for the consumer. As you go globally there's very little advantage in that."

Linksys was founded as a separate company in 1988, and by 1999 had moved from selling basic Ethernet equipment to specializing in routers, the most famous of which is likely the open-source WRT54G. Cisco took notice as the company grew, and eventually decided to buy Linksys in 2003. [via Uberpulse]