Asnt.ob, a penny stock, true.
But a price-to-sales ratio of about .25 -- nice!
It's a risky stock with declining revenues in some areas but growth in other areas and at least one award-winning product.
I keep installing their little SOHO Ethernet routers (FriendlyNet routers, about 1 every 10 days) and they're my favorite in their class. Such devices may seem fungible nowadays, but I assure you they are not due to differences in user-interface, features, support and performance. Asante's awards are deserved.
The LinkSys SOHO box I tried was cheap but lowered throughput quite a bit on a small-office aDSL line with static IP.
NetGear's router looks good and sturdy, that's what caused one of my client's to buy it, but its interface was so confusing and their PPPoE didn't work (they blamed the DSL provider); I brought in an Asante router and its PPPoE connected immediately and is such a damn breeze to set up and upgrade.
Netopia's Ethernet routers are sweet but 2 to 3 times more expensive and I think they still lack PPPoE.
Four or five years ago I set up many ISDN routers including Ascend Pipeline models. I wish those had Asante's clear and easy-to-use interface. Netopia's were my favorite ISDN routers, but the point is Asante's SOHO routers offer wonderful features, great support and are very easy to set up, configure and upgrade.
I certainly didn't and wouldn't bet the farm on Asante, but I recently went long last week for a 1000 shares, only about $600 total and won't mind if I lose the whole thing.
If I didn't use them and love so much and if their Price-to-Sales ratio wasn't so very low, I wouldn't have been interested. |
