2014-10-07 Tuesday: Newer Belkin routers not working?

[Ichinisan]

I am not sure I follow your point. I have random boxes of old but still working hardware also. Not that I would want to use a WRT54G anymore.

If your current router fried and you needed to get by with an old 10/100 for a little while, you could connect the old router and use it.

If Belkin's heartbeat server is offline in 7-10 years, the current crop of routers will not work. That's stupid.

 

[VirtualLarry]

That's stupid.

Indeed. I wonder how many other routers "phone home" like that?

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

I ran into this problem yesterday morning. Finally spoke to a tech at Brighthouse that told me it was an issue with Belkin routers. After reading this thread I am boxing up my router and selling it tomorrow.

fu Belkin. In the future you should own up to your mistakes. Oh...and stop building routers that need to phone home. What a bunch of crap. Hope you lose a ton of business from this fiasco.

 

[s44]

And this is why I only buy routers that run Tomato.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yikes that's not good. I'd hate not being under 100% control of my router/firewall. This makes me glad I run pfsense...

 

[imagoon]

If your current router fried and you needed to get by with an old 10/100 for a little while, you could connect the old router and use it.

If Belkin's heartbeat server is offline in 7-10 years, the current crop of routers will not work. That's stupid.

I would normally just grab the 3 year old one. Or enable the one built in to the cable modem. Besides on the Belkin you disable "auto discover" and the issue goes away.

 

[imagoon]

Yikes that's not good. I'd hate not being under 100% control of my router/firewall. This makes me glad I run pfsense...

You actually do have control. You turn that feature off.

 

[JackMDS]

If an Alien would come today to earth and would see this thread, his assumption would be that” poor earthlings” are stuck with one Router called Belkin and have a miserable life.

The real question is Why One buy, or use Belkin.

Belkin were for long time at the lowest tier of Network hardware. They are trying to improve their image by recently buying Cisco’s Linksys.

Cisco is a Star company in commercial Networking. They bought the Linksys line not long time ago with the hope to penetrate the lower end market. Selling last year probably means that the idea failed.

As far as Linksys goes, they produce huge amount of models but very few that you could write home about. WRT54GL? only the first few versions were Good. Even them were good not as is, their glory came from the 3rd party firmware that Linksys fought against tooth and nail in the first few years.

That said, it is good to buy the crap, it gives reasons to complain and “Drama King”, a trend that seems to be gladly adopted in online technology discussions. It is Not any more Forums about technology but the Facebook of technological oriented people.

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In general I think that current trend in Entry level Networking hardware is not to provide good Solid hardware. The trend is to “bug” the hardware as a mean for market/marketing related ploys. That means that it will get worth before it will collapsed and then get better.

 

[Elixer]

The real question is Why One buy, or use Belkin.

Since it is available everywhere, Target, Walmart, and whatever else all have lots of Belkin units.
You never see good routers at those places, so people end up buying what they see on the shelf.

 

[Ichinisan]

If an Alien would come today to earth and would see this thread, his assumption would be that” poor earthlings” are stuck with one Router called Belkin and have a miserable life.

The real question is Why One buy, or use Belkin.

Belkin were for long time at the lowest tier of Network hardware. They are trying to improve their image by recently buying Cisco’s Linksys.

Cisco is a Star company in commercial Networking. They bought the Linksys line not long time ago with the hope to penetrate the lower end market. Selling last year probably means that the idea failed.

As far as Linksys goes, they produce huge amount of models but very few that you could write home about. WRT54GL? only the first few versions were Good. Even them were good not as is, their glory came from the 3rd party firmware that Linksys fought against tooth and nail in the first few years.

That said, it is good to buy the crap, it gives reasons to complain and “Drama King”, a trend that seems to be gladly adopted in online technology discussions. It is Not any more Forums about technology but the Facebook of technological oriented people.

-----------
In general I think that current trend in Entry level Networking hardware is not to provide good Solid hardware. The trend is to “bug” the hardware as a mean for market/marketing related ploys. That means that it will get worth before it will collapsed and then get better.

I am still 100% convinced that Cisco bought Linksys specifically to handicap the products with buggy firmware. They were scared of all the small businesses running off a cheap Linksys router instead of an expensive Cisco router. Brilliant move, Cisco.

That said, I never had any particular problems with Belkin in the past. They worked just as well (or just as poorly) as any other brand.

I have a *lot* of experience with consumer-grade network equipment.

 

[smitbret]

So, after reading this thread, I am mildly paranoid about the heartbeat ping and wondering what other routers do this.

I would like to test my current setup by just unplugging the modem for awhile and seeing if the network goes down. How long should I leave the modem down before calling it a success? Does it ping once a day, once a minute.....?