said by chgo_man99:customer owned equipment are primarly more unmanaged, more power oriented (video streaming, gaming, etc). If you wanna truly managed equipment you gotta pay more for it and learn more how to customize to your needs. You wanna fancy graphs, etc? You need to set up a monitoring server, cron jobs and mrtg, learn script languages, etc...
Not true.
Companies like dd-wrt make money offering all the best features on lower powered equipment.
Cisco will not release firmware on their low end equipment that does everything their high end equipment does. They are trying to protect their high end products.
Cisco wants you to pay more for fully manned equipment, but with dd-wrt, tomoto, smoothwall, monowall, or your own programed software definately competes with their high end software.