My Netgear WGR614 v6 router had served me faithfully for about 1.5 years, but it has been acting up lately: slowing traffic significantly, dropping connections, etc. This morning, it stopped routing packets to the WAN entirely. Will it work when I get home tonight, after being turned off all day? Perhaps. And if it does, will it keep working? Who knows…
I went with Netgear to get away from the crap that Linksys has put out the past several years (I’ve personally seen several pieces of Linksys hardware fail), and now it seems that Netgear is no better! The damn thing is almost certainly out of warranty, so it appears that I have nothing but a tempting shotgun target.
Why is it that this kind of hardware even fails? It’s not like it contains hot-running CPUs or huge power supply capacitors. This is relatively simple, solid-state stuff that, in my mind, just shouldn’t fail under normal conditions.
Will a D-Link router be any better?
Update: Tonight, it seems to be working fine. Is there a heat issue involved? Will it continue to function?
Update 5-28-2007: So far, it has continued to operate correctly. One change I made (besides updating the firmware) was to place the cable modem next to the router, rather than on top of it. Heat issue?
Update 12-14-2007: The Netgear router has continued to operate without a problem. As I mentioned before, don’t put anything on top of it — make sure it can stay cool.
Update 3-26-2008: The router is acting up again.