As near as I can tell, they haven't released a new product in at least 5 years. Their top line router product appears to be based on an Atom platform from 2010. Not too surprising their sales declined.
I'm sorry to read this. I've watched the single board computer space slowly lose ethernet; the connector is too large. I'd love a board with two built-in ethernet connectors so I could route traffic. With Soekris exiting the market, what options are now available?
Possiby not what you want to hear, but personally I have always bought (usually for peanuts) used (fanless) "thin clients" and added a PCI NIC, they make very good routers on the cheap, and since (originally) the machines were sold for lots of money to the enterprise market, they are generally very good quality/well built, sturdy, suffer not from overheating, etc.
If you want to buy "new" there are several suitable mini-itx boards available.
I migrated about a year ago from using net4801s to Ubiquity EdgeRouter Lite devices. The EdgeRouter Lite has 3 Gigabit ethernet ports. I got to keep my network topology and the software was flexible enough to mostly configure it how I wanted. I had been using a "from scratch" custom built Linux on the net4801s, but it was becoming more and more painful to keep up to date.
That hasn't been my experience.
I inherited a net5501 that encountered what seemed to be temperature dependent random hanging, on both Linux and BSD.
I also found that the case was mildly frustrating to put together with all of the addon features in use.
It's a box that I initially found charming, but my patience with it wore thin over time until I was dreading having to support it and finally replaced it with a workstation board.
Sad to hear, I remember some people in the Seattle Wireless project used their gear and at a previous company we used their 4521s for some of the original prototypes around 2003. Worked great.
I wonder what the story was.