Quote:
Originally Posted by BWillie
Have you guys noticed the need to make your ISP switch your router out every so often? I wonder what type of life those things have until they started to act wonky. I've noticed lately my router (I'm a dumbass and rent it from them) goes down way to often. It's about 3 years old now.
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I wouldn't ever use an ISP router. They're almost always inferior to what you can buy yourself in terms of both performance and security and they're often quite a bit more expensive.
That being said, consumer routers fail a lot more often than you'd think. Power supplies especially tend to start failing after 2-3 years, whether you're talking about Netgear, Linksys, or any of those. The resulting voltage fluctuations cause all kinds of weird symptoms on the router - wireless drops, random reboots, interfaces going down and coming back up.
The other issue with most consumer routers is that the companies only update firmware for a couple of years at most. Some of the bigger name companies have been known to stop updating after just ONE YEAR. Not only is that not good for advanced performance and stability but it's a huge security issue.
Right now, the strongest recommendation I can give for somebody that doesn't want to dive into a higher-cost prosumer solution is to get something like Asus and look for 3rd party firmware - I use RMerlin which is built on the original Asus codebase but with newer binaries, which makes it more secure and stable. Plus Merlin has been supporting his codebase for a long time, it's not inconceivable for him to support some router lines for 6 or more years.