Network Hardware - Structured Cabling

From being a mundane, action-less category, this has become a rather interesting category for us to analyze over the past few years. It's interesting because the brand that got the highest score, D-Link and the second highest scorer, DIGILINK were a part of the same company a few years ago. In fact, D-Link was the name of the company, while DIGILINK was (and still is) the name of the structured cabling brand. So long as it was the same company, it didn't matter if the award went to the company D-Link or the brand

DIGILINK because the laurels went to the same group.

And then, back in 2008, the company D-Link India had a de-merger and became two separate entities-D-Link and Smartlink Network Systems. It was done with the understanding that D-Link would remain into selling and marketing of the active networking products (switches, routers, etc) business, while the latter would sell the passive ones (structured cabling product portfolio). So the actual structured cabling brand DIGILINK went to Smartlink. Last year, Smartlink sold off the DIGILINK structured cabling brand and business to Schneider Electric, and the company D-Link, also got into the race and introduced its own structured cabling product portfolio.

This year, the brand D-Link got the highest score in structured cabling, followed by DIGILINK, so we didn't know whom to give the award to. Since “the new” D-Link introduced its structured cabling less than a year ago, it couldn't claim the right to the votes for people who had been using structured cabling for many years from “the old” D-Link. But we didn't know whether to give the votes to DIGILINK because we didn't know if the users really knew the brand.

So to be fair, we took the extra effort to do a separate set of interactions with some of the respondents who had mentioned the name D-Link, to check whether they meant D-Link or DIGILINK. The response was mixed. Most people said they only knew D-Link and didn't know there's a brand called DIGILINK, even though they had been using structured cabling from “the old” D-Link for many years. Some said they didn't know the brand differentiation between the two, and most importantly, some said they weren't sure which brand to really go for in the future-D-Link or DIGILINK.

When users themselves aren't sure of which brand do they currently own, they can't possibly decide which one they're likely to go with in the future. Therefore, this year, we've decided not to declare any winner in this category. Both companies, Schneider Electric who now owns DIGILINK, and “the new” D-Link would have to work towards clearing this confusion about their brands so that the real judge, their customer, can clearly point out one brand in this category as their brand of choice.

We hope that our readers will know the difference between D-Link and DIGILINK after reading this, so that they can tell us who'll be the winner next year.