If your router is older than three years......

[brandonkick]

Lets be a little more specific.


If a user is running a router that is 802.11 a or b then yes it's time to upgrade.

If a user is in an apartment building, and their are four other routers on each floor,
then yes they might need to operate on a different frequency.

If they have a 10 year old router, that has weak internal antenna, then yes they
may need to upgrade.

I have an old WRT54G that has got to be at least 10 years old. It still runs like a champ
to this day.

Many many routers are much more than three years old, which offer 802.11 n and have
two or three good external antenna, are out there kicking butt every day. Heck 802.11 AC
is heading for 3 years old now. That could have been a decent article, aside from basically
treating the reader like you need to be an IT expert to understand or setup a router (which
you do not) and coming up with this "3 years" rule which makes zero sense.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I have an old WRT54G that has got to be at least 10 years old. It still runs like a champ
to this day.

Man..if I had a nickle for every one of those I unboxed and installed. Just threw out our last pile of old ones last spring... a couple of talllllll stacks I made with them in the closet, like 40 of 'em. Flashed quite a few of them with various 3rd party firmware, had extra long high gain antennas on 'em. Ran great...back in the day. Can't keep up with my demands today though.....too many concurrent connections on 'em now.

 

[NJW]

Can't keep up with my demands today though

Your demands, but not everybody's. Plenty of use cases where a WRT54G fits the bill nicely, probably not in a business environment.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Your demands, but not everybody's. Plenty of use cases where a WRT54G fits the bill nicely, probably not in a business environment.

Yeah..depends what you do. For todays broadband, wireless "G" is a bottleneck. Real world speeds are 18-22 megs...not all 54 megs. Even hard wired to the wrt...with its humble (by todays standards) 133MHz CPU, and depending on the version...2-4 megs of RAM...the router itself was good for about 45 megs bidirectional throughput, and its concurrent sessions limit was really pretty low (due to low RAM)..no matter what firmware you ran. Think it was below 100. Todays routers...over 100,000 concurrent sessions is more typical...and usually over several hundred megs of bidirectional throughput for basic models.

Todays streaming video on cell phones, Chromecast or Firestick or AppleTV for streaming to TV, get 2x clients trying to pull at the same time...you divide the ~20 megs by 2...(since each additional concurrent wireless client divides the bandwidth +1), Ain't left with much for todays smart phones, laptops, smart TVs, streaming entertainment systems.

Similar to back in the late 90's...us gamers loved building great "bang for the buck" systems based on the venerable Abit BH-6 motherboard with the Celeron 300A processor..and overclocking the snot out of it past 450 even 500 MHz (I think I ran mine at 504 most of the time).