this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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I mean, some of those EOLed nearly a decade ago.
You can argue over what a reasonable EOL is, but all hardware is going to EOL at some point, and at that point, it isn't going to keep getting updates.
Throw enough money at a vendor, and I'm sure that you can get extended support contracts that will keep it going for however long people are willing to keep chucking money at a vendor -- some businesses pay for support on truly ancient hardware -- but this is a consumer broadband router. It's unlikely to make a lot of sense to do so on this -- the hardware isn't worth much, nor is it going to be terribly expensive to replace, and especially if you're using the wireless functionality, you probably want support for newer WiFi standards anyway that updated hardware will bring.
I do think that there's maybe a good argument that EOLing hardware should be handled in a better way. Like, maybe hardware should ship with an EOL sticker, so that someone can glance at hardware and see if it's "expired". Or maybe network hardware should have some sort of way of reporting EOL in response to a network query, so that someone can audit a network for EOLed hardware.
But EOLing hardware is gonna happen.
This is the correct reaction to old home equipment.
Right?
Something this old is going to be power inefficient compared to newer stuff, and simply not perform as well.
I would know, I just booted up a 10 year old consumer router last night, because the current one died. It'll be OK for a few days until I can get a replacement. Boy, is this thing slow.
My cat likes how much heat they make too.
I have a netgear router that isn't even that old and it doesn't have gigabit ports.
even though I was able to throw openwrt on there to mess around with it's still e-waste
e-waste? a lot of networks dont need anywhere near gigabit. Especially because at a lot of places around the world even the ISP can't provide that bandwidth for internet, but this applies to internal networks too. in a lot of cases a 100 mbps capable managed switch (which a router can be, even if with limitations) is enough