Buffalo nudges £19 barrier for N-class router

We’re not in the habit of flagging special offers on KitGuru. There are specialist places for this … they’re called shops. But UK reseller Dabs just pinged us with an offer that made KitGuru almost choke on the Saturday morning cornflakes. Have things really moved this far?

(Move to black and white, with random speckles on the footage)

KitGuru was at a network show in the nineties where HP demonstrated one of the first gigabit network connection, over a 1 metre cable, in a sealed test environment. Two years later, at the same event, HP was demonstrating the same speed of connection across a length of barbed wire. On August 31^st 1999, Apple launched the Power Mac G4, the world’s first mass production system that shipped with gigabit Ethernet as standard. Now you get it glued on to the back of even the cheapest mainboards.

Such is the pace of development in networking, from a technological perspective, that it takes something pretty significant to surprise you.

The 802.11N spec went from draft format in 2007, to fully certified in October 2009.  Now it’s everywhere, but normally around £50. With the offer we received this morning and routers dipping toward £19 (€23 or $28), the number of high-speed access points is likely to grow massively.

David Atherton set up his business systems company a long time ago, and it's now owned by British Telecom. David was generally well liked in the industry and how he left was pretty shocking to most people.  The Buffalo router for 19 pounds and 99p might be a limited offer now, but it's probably a good indicator of where the ‘mass market' will be in the near future.

KitGuru says: It's hard to argue with this kind of price, but we have to be concerned that it might trash the price for other vendors like D-Link, Netgear and Belkin. Should we, as consumers, feel guilty that we find the best bargains in the bone piles of fallen competitors?

Discuss in our forum here or just leave a quick comment below.

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