Router Life Expectancy 2 years

Jagger100

Supreme [H]ardness
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Oct 31, 2004
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I've had 3 middle-high end routers die in about 2 years each. By die I mean I start have a ton of dropped connections that replacing the router fixes.

This always seems to happen on the 2.4 GHz band and not the 5 Ghz band. that remains functioning fine. The 2.4 is the most used.

Just FYI, I live in a Brownstone layout condo. Six attached homes crammed right next each other. So we're dense, not apartment dense, but not anything like a traditional suburban neighborhood.

Just wondering is it the fighting with other routers causing the early death?

A couple of observations:
Somebody near me has uber signal strength. Using a WiFi Analyzer app, their signal is stronger in my house than my router including the room where the router is located.

No matter what channel I change my router to, a bunch of other WiFi signals align with my channel after days. One of these is my streaming device which I think has a private network going with its remote, but there's more of these that I can explain by my devices.
 
Perhaps that fighting it hard on them, but what I'd be curious is if they work well as just an AP or do they still have problems. The other thing is that with that type of density, wireless sucks. I remember having 10x signals stronger than our own in our apartment once the occupancy went up. There were literally 100 APs on both bands--it was completely ridiculous. Didn't affect me because I'm wired everything, but my wife was complaining that we didn't have our same 150Mbps download. After trying everything, I just upgraded to 300Mbps for her to have her 150, haha.

A couple of things that helped our wifi situation--leave the channels on auto--no need to even try setting anything because everything else is going to be constantly hopping around anyways and will step on your channel at some point. Better to leave everything to continuously hop as it did a better job of finding out how to keep the speeds up. Also, move as much as you can to 5Ghz if 2.4 is the primary problem. Again leaving stuff on auto as the others will also be on auto.

Wire every thing you possibly can using whatever wired you can--powerlines, moca, long ethernet cable, whatever. The less stuff you have shouting in the air, the better (like that remote you can't do anything about.

Increase your isp bandwidth if that's an issue. I would look at this as a last resort, but sometimes that's easier than changing people's minds. ;)
 
Ya high end to me would be Rokus and more enterprise APs, not a $500 over priced Asus Router / Wifi
 
Ya high end to me would be Rokus and more enterprise APs, not a $500 over priced Asus Router / Wifi
Yeah I'm thinking relative to home. Mid-home may be more accurate.

Netgear WiFi Router AC1750 Dual Band Gigabit (R6300v2)
NETGEAR R6700 Nighthawk AC1750 Dual Band Smart WiFi Router, Gigabit Ethernet (R6700)
Linksys AC1750 Dual-Band Smart Wireless Router with MU-MIMO, Works with Amazon Alexa (Max Stream EA7300)
 
I'd actually look not at the WiFI part, as it sadly isn't possible to kill a router over the air without some serious gear, but at the wires instead.
Could be some other device on your network having electrical issues and not playing nice with the others. Or failed insulation somewhere down the wire that occasionally zaps your router.
 
are you stacking it on anything else, something that gives off extra heat?
 
Ive had 3 routers so far, a netgear FVS318, FVS338 and an Asus AC88U. I had the first one for 5 years, second one for 10 and the asus one for 3 so far. All still work fine.
 
For 3 routers/2 vendors to have similar issues Id start looking at power wiring or unit placement. You have it in a cubbyhole where heat is getting trapped? On a power strip shared with other devices? Got it sitting in a microwave?

I have 4 Nighthawk 6700's in use for various family (switching them to ubiquity slowly) and they have been going strong for I think 5 years. No issues, only thing done are firmware updates. All with a mix of 2.4 and 5 devices. I replaced 2 units already and the old R6700's were given to friends who needed something more powerful and as far as I know are still working. I always ran my units direct to wall power or with a high quality surge strip with low draw devices.
 
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