Belkin


Belkin International, Inc., is an American manufacturer of consumer electronics that specializes in :wikt:connectivity|connectivity devices. Headquartered in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, California, it sells various consumer and commercial product lines, including routers, iPod and iPhone accessories, mobile computing accessories, surge protectors, network switches, hubs, cables, KVM switches, racks and enclosures, and other peripherals. Belkin International is the parent company for Belkin, Linksys and Wemo branded products and services, as well as the smart home water management company, Phyn.

History

Belkin was founded in 1983 in California, by Steve Bellow and Chet Pipkin.
In March 2013, Belkin acquired Cisco Systems' Home Networking Business Unit, including the Linksys brand and product line. On March 26, 2018, a subsidiary of Foxconn, Foxconn Interconnect Technology, announced its intent to acquire Belkin for US$866 million.

Sponsorship and community work

Between May 2013 and the end of the 2014 season, Belkin sponsored a Dutch professional cycling team, Belkin Pro Cycling Team. Belkin stepped in after the team formerly known as Rabobank lost their headline sponsor.
Belkin is involved in the local Compton community through the ASAP program with the LASD and the Everybody Wins reading program. Belkin supports Susan G. Komen for the Cure to fight breast cancer through its pink ribbon iPod cases that have helped raise $350,000 for the organization. In 2007, Belkin made a holiday donation to the One Laptop per Child initiative.

Criticism

In 2003, Belkin released a home-use wireless router which would occasionally replace users' HTTP requests with an advertisement for Belkin's filtering software. Belkin received some intense criticism for this from technically literate customers and others who described it as a man-in-the-middle attack or a form of session hijacking. Belkin initially treated this as a public relations problem rather than an inappropriate action on their part, but later relented and issued a firmware update deleting this functionality from the product.
In early 2009, a Belkin 'online sales representative' was discovered paying Amazon.com, Newegg and Buy.com users to manipulate reviews of a notoriously buggy Belkin router. Belkin's President, Mark Reynoso, responded to criticism, saying that the company does not engage in unethical practices, noting however that 'one of our employees' may have been responsible. On January 19, 2009, gizmodo.com published a letter from an anonymous Belkin worker, where the employee claims that for years all workers were pressed upon to "do whatever is needed to get good product reviews and good press", which included "sending blog writers a device with custom firmware that hides known bugs", "faking hardware logo certifications", as well as "writing poor reviews of competitors products".