Sick of home routers

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kur1j

Gawd
Joined
Sep 13, 2003
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So I have 3x Linksys routers, 1x wired and 2x wireless. A netgear and a d-link router in the past 4ish years.

All of them have been total crap. The wired linksys router (before cisco) lasted the longest (around 1.5 years). After that it would random disconnect all the computer on the lan and then reset it self. Wasn't so bad and could hardly notice it if you were just surfing the net but if you were playing a game or chatting on some type of chat client it would disconnect you. For surfing it would just act if the page was loading slow.

After that I got a netgear router it lasted about 3 days before it wouldn't even power on (sent it back and got money back).

The d-link lasted about 9 months the wired part seems to still work to a certian point. Basicly does the same thing as the first linksys router.

After the d-link I went and got a wireless linksys router. It is about a month old and for some reason it won't let me ping the damn thing. I reset it back to factory defaults plugged 3 different cables in and it will randomly time out on a ping. (Would ping the router 192.168.1.1 about 50 times, 20 of them would time out). Two different desktops and a laptop after a factor default rest unplugged other tha power and cat 5 it will randomly just stop responding to a ping.

The other linksys wireless router is about 3 weeks old back at my old house and my mom just said the laptop wasn't picking up a signal from the damn router anymore (she might have just screwed with some kinda setting with the laptop). Not 100% sure if its the router or laptop. Honestly I don't expect it to be the laptop.

Overall this is rediculous. I am so sick of these stupid 70 dollar pieces of shit.

So in all I have spent roughly 350+ dollars on crap that fails within 2 years.

Is anyone else having this crappy of luck with these stupid things?
 
If it were just me and you, then i would say, "sorry, its just you; i havent had any problems".

But i'm sure there are plenty of others who have gone through it the same as you. As far as home routers go, my parents have a Belkin wired / wireless that has been solid for 2 years now, and at my house i have a WRT54G that i havent had a problem with in since i bought it.

Hope your next purchase goes better. I do recommend the belkin on the consumer-level.
 
Yeah I have a Linksys WRT54GS thats been going strong for almost 3 years now. Flashed with Tomato, its the best.
 
Same here. My previous router was an SMC that still works but I decided to switch to a WRT54G. That router has been going strong for just over 3 years.
 
I haven't used any of those "home routers" yet, always been a Linux or OpenBSD box doing the NAT for me, and I'm using a Linksys WAP54G for wireless.
 
Cisco has been the most reliable and stable of my routers, but I had a Netgear that worked great after I added a heatsink to it. Before that, it would kinda do the same thing you were saying. Start to act like the connection was slowing down, then nothing. I had to turn it off for a few minutes, then it was fine for a while again.
 
Had the WRT54G and I too started experiencing issues after about a year (even after upgrading the firmware to the likes of Tomato - even went as far as scheduling a cron job to reboot the thing nightly!)... Also had issues with the cheap D-Link routers of the time and my brother had issues after a while with some Netgear routers. Not sure what the cuase - could be anything from increased pounding from the WAN side, part failure, more wireless networks around, etc..

Based on reviews, I went and got the D-Link DGL-4300 about a year ago and there was a noticable improvement across the board and haven't had an issue yet. Never have to reset it (though I do out of habit periodically) and ping times were even further reduced!

So, I actually would side with you that general home/cheap routers are not worth it. Get yourself a decent router over the $100 mark like the DGL-4300 (I hear the DI-655 is really good too).
 
Are these routers getting proper ventilation / NOT sitting of something giving off heat ? While I have seen routers just crap out for no reason your precentage seems a bit high, and sounds like something in the environment may be causing the issue..
 
Ive had about 3 diff. routers over the course of the past 2 years....

they randomly disconnect - DLink
linksys, fails on wifi

I think next time Iam going to buy a corp. level router with a 16 port switch or something.
 
You can always build your own out of a old PC with 2 NIC's. I'm using two old P3 866 machines running pfSense, rock solid. I've never relied on the consumer grade routers before, but I have a big box full of dead ones that people have given me, most seem to have lasted 2-4 years and croaked one day.
 
Not sure how much better you can get by just sitting alone on a table for ventilation. It isn't in a desk or shoved in some cabinet where it can't get any air.

I had a smoothwall box that I really liked but I moved away to college so I just got a wireless router.
 
I have seen many friends burn through Linksys routers like they were free or sometihng. On the other hand my D-Link is 4 years old and works as well as ever.
 
I have a WRT54G v3 w/ Tomato - 1.04.0944.

I had issues with other firmware's - but I've found the sweet spot here.
 
About a year and a half ago I used to run a smoothwall box on a 24 d-link router (which I still use today), then I just said, hell, this is just a home setup anyway. 10 computers in my house along with an xbox,I just decided to pick up a random Linksys router with a 4 port switch built in from Wal-Mart for $40, I still have it today with no issues what so ever, its pretty fast, I use the router to broadcast DHCP for the D-Link 24 port, and to pull my IP/DNS from my ISP. I also have a Linksys WRT54G going off the linksys router, and everything runs just fine.
All this for about a year and a half and not a single problem. I don't know why you're having alot of problems.
 
I've had good luck with my routers. I had a D-link DI-614+ that I used for a while, and I upgraded to a WRT54G v2.2 around 3 years ago and originally ran sveasoft. I moved to DD-WRT ~1.5 years ago, and been running that ever since. I did take the router apart and have it sitting without it's case, and a heatsink on both the cpu and wifi chipset. For the past 6 months it's been overclocked from its default 200MHz to 250MHz. Guess I got lucky with this one.

At my parents house, I got them a WRT54G v3.2, and it failed slightly after a month. I could never get it to boot again. Then I got some Netgear router, it worked, but wouldn't let my dad to connect to his work Cisco VPN. We eventually scrapped that and I got them a Buffalo router, which has worked great for the 2 months it's been setup.
 
kur1j said:
Not sure how much better you can get by just sitting alone on a table for ventilation. It isn't in a desk or shoved in some cabinet where it can't get any air.
Click to expand...

It was mostly just for fun, but I wanted to see if it actually helped, and it did.

routermod.jpg
 
I have a WRT54G running for 2.5 years now. It almost sounds like you are getting too much voltage to your routers, as they seem to be "burning out."
 
Sorry, but I bought a D-Link DGL-4300 when they were a fairly new item (this would have been sometime in 2004 I believe) and it has been perfect since Day 1.

There is a large difference between upper and lower end of everyone's products, and some product lines have been better than others, I'll admit. I've had issues with some of Netgear's white line of products (as opposed to the blue metal boxes, which have been quite good for me), and Linksys has had occasional quality control issues over the years, but overall, I think you've just had some really bad luck. Hopefully it changes for the better; otherwise, if you have a cheap P2/P3 box lying around, you could make it into a Monowall or Smoothwall box, it just needs two supported NIC cards.
 
I went to wrap boards at some friends houses to fix issues they have had. Others we have just gone to cisco 871's. Have one for home but have yet to get around to setting it up(way too lazy).

I'm waiting for the replacement of wrap to come out and I'm going to install it I think. Not sure what I'm going to do with the 871.

If I don't go for the wrap solution I'm going to pickup a new small pc and use it as a unix firewall that handles some other things.
 
Cisco will be phazing out the Linksys name soon. At least that's what /. says.
 
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