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As the purchaser and support, either personally, or through family, roomates, co-workders, and one landlord, of no less than Fifteen Linksys WRT54G[L] in the la
by ghshephard 14y ago
As the purchaser and support, either personally, or through family, roomates, co-workders, and one landlord, of no less than Fifteen Linksys WRT54G[L] in the last 10 years (with the obligatory OpenWRT Mods), and a network engineer/manager by occupation - I look forward to seeing if Belkin can come up with a <$200 router that reliably works for more than 3 years. I think I've seen about 50% failure rate in a 3 year period for those fifteen Linksys WRT54Gs, as compared to the dozen Cisco 2621s that I have reaching year ten w/ 0% mortality.
Yes - I realize that a $75 Consumer WAP is going to be less reliable than a $2000 commercial router, but I would hope, over time, someone would come up with a inexpensive, reliable, workhorse consumer router.
Now that Belkin is acquiring the Linksys name, maybe they'll deliver it.
- ericcholis 14y agoThe WRT54Gs needs to be in a museum somewhere. It sparked a side-movement of openness and hacking. Such a great device.
- Ecio78 14y agoI had a Dlink ADSL router (in the 100 Euro range) and it died after 2-3 years (i think 2004-2006). Then I bought a Draytek router (because I needed VPN features), it was pricey (250 Euro) but it has since lasted for years (I'm still using it after 6-7 years). For SoHo I think an Alix or similar hw running Pfsense could be a good choice.
- Djehngo 14y agoWhen I was a student a lot of the houses I or my friends lived in had belkin routers/wifi access points. I don't think I encountered a single one that worked reliably, so I wouldn't hold my breath if I was you.
- pilif 14y agoWhile everybody is complaining about Apple's AirPort being too epensive, of my ~15 devices that I have deployed for myself and for others in the last 8 years, none have broken down. Also in all this time, none have crashed and needed to be restarted. I realize that a web interface for management would be nice. I realize that I pay a premium for the brand. But I also think that there's a value in not having to replace devices continuously or just having to explain people how to restart them when they crash. For me, this value is worth the premium.
- darkarmani 14y agoAn idea why my Tomato flashed router needs a weekly reboot? I can't tell if it overheats, or what, but it gets to a point where it just stops responding: dhcp, WIFI association, etc.
- ghshephard 14y agoIs it a Linksys WRT54G? If so - check out my comments up top. The devices just tend to fail, with approx 50% mortality rate over 3 years. With that said, I have a Linksys WRT54G that is now about 8 years old and still going strong, so obviously there is variance.