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Why do people refer to SOHO routers as "reliable"

S

spidey07

No Lifer
There are plenty of posts - "I'm gonna stick with this model because it's reliable". I won't buy "x, because it's not reliable."

These are all solid state devices, there shouldn't be a question of reliability. Outside of the unusual bug they are all reliable.

I've been running the same linksys router for 8 years now. No need to get another one.

Are SOHO routers really "unreliable" or is it user error? Wireless I can understand because the whole technology is unreliable by design, but it isn't the router/APs fault.
 
Some do lockup. I had a no-name router I was given. It needed a reboot every other day or so.

The Netgear WGT624 V3 I have now sometimes needs a reboot, but its maybe once or twice a year. Wireless with my router does appear to be a problem, but at least part of that is that I live in student area and when I have problems with wireless there are usualy more wireless networks in range than you can shake a stick at.

These days I stick to wired and as said maybee a reboot twice a year. I very ofen run Bittorrent and often get 1.6 MBs+ on downloads. My browsing on all the machines is fine. I do limit the upload bandwidth on the torrents to ~50% of the upload speed of my link to the internet.

The biggest problem I had was the old ambit cable modem on the ISP's 10Mbs service. That would lockup within a few hours of running a few bittorrent downloads. Once the ISP replaced the cable modem everything has been fine. Once the service went to 20Mbs I had to make changes to the TCP settings (window size and RFC1323) to get the full 20Mbs.

Another thing I do use on the WGT624 is the DHCP reservations. I have all my network drives mapped by IP. Using reservations means I get the same IP for each of the machines and any changes to the DNS ect are made by DHCP. I had noticed before that the DNS given by DHCP did change so I started using reservations.

I may well be updating the router soon but it will be a linux machine, or a Cisco one. If its the Cisco one I cant remember the model but it will be the one with a 100BT interface on the WAN side and a 100BT/Gigabit 4 port switch on the LAN side. The main reason for updating the router is that my ISP is going for a 50 Mbs service soon, and I'm not sure how well the WGT624 will cope.

How many SOHO routers will cope with a fully used 50Mbs service?

Rob Murphy
 
First issue of Reliability has to do with QA and rushing to market.

There are Entry Level units that suffer from poor QA at the factory gates, and thus more of them do not work when they get to the consumers hand.

Manufacturer seems to be worried about the competition getting first to market.

Therefore, a whole culture of upgrading firmware was developed. I.e. the vendor releases a buggy model with idea it would be fixed later and the consumer will download and flash.

So you RMAed, or and flashed few times necessary and you have a stable unit.

At this stage, the devices would work for long time.

Now it is a time for car analogy ;D
If you buy a small sedan and use it for going to work, to the mall, etc. you can have a reliable car for long time.
However, if you open a construction business and you start using your small sedan to carry hundreds of lbs of cement, sand, and other building material the car would soon ?die?.

Many users complains about Entry level Network device are along the Cement-Sand line.:shocked:

 
There are plenty of home routers that are not exactly reliable. Even the wireless dlink router that everyone was raving about did not work as they advertised (QoS problems with Vonage and in order to get it to work after upgrading you had to reconfigure the whole thing) SOHO routers are meant to be better designed, more mature products that can go faster and deal with more users without crashing. Like the linksys RV082 has been around for years and they keep spending time improving the firmware and fixing small problems, so you get reliability from the manufacturer who won't say that they are not upgrading it anymore because that router has already had its 15 min on the sales floor.

Just my 2 cents
 
Reliability is a relative term. If someone uses their Linksys home router and is placed in a dusty/hot environment for a long period, I assume reliability goes down.
 
Originally posted by: spidey07
There are plenty of posts - "I'm gonna stick with this model because it's reliable". I won't buy "x, because it's not reliable."

These are all solid state devices, there shouldn't be a question of reliability. Outside of the unusual bug they are all reliable.

I've been running the same linksys router for 8 years now. No need to get another one.

Are SOHO routers really "unreliable" or is it user error? Wireless I can understand because the whole technology is unreliable by design, but it isn't the router/APs fault.
Click to expand...

Linksys has had some reliability issues over the past years. So it isnt just user error. Frequent issues with rebooting or dropped wireless.

My dad has been using a linksys router from 2001 without issue. We had a linksys wireless router here at work and I replaced it because it needed a reboot twice a day. Replace with d-link and they seem to work fine.

At my home I have a Cisco 834(?) SOHO router and it works flawlessly. Friend has a 3com and the thing is a pos.

/shrug
 
Originally posted by: Genx87
Originally posted by: spidey07
There are plenty of posts - "I'm gonna stick with this model because it's reliable". I won't buy "x, because it's not reliable."

These are all solid state devices, there shouldn't be a question of reliability. Outside of the unusual bug they are all reliable.

I've been running the same linksys router for 8 years now. No need to get another one.

Are SOHO routers really "unreliable" or is it user error? Wireless I can understand because the whole technology is unreliable by design, but it isn't the router/APs fault.
Click to expand...

Linksys has had some reliability issues over the past years. So it isnt just user error. Frequent issues with rebooting or dropped wireless.

My dad has been using a linksys router from 2001 without issue. We had a linksys wireless router here at work and I replaced it because it needed a reboot twice a day. Replace with d-link and they seem to work fine.
Click to expand...

i ran into a number of linksys routers that would randomly default themselves. i worked for a wISP that used static IPs in the service area i worked in, so all customer routers had to have the WAN IP configured.

we saw maybe 2 a month that would just shit themselves and return to the default config or where there was some other problem with the WAN side where it would lose connection. hell, i just replaced a linksys here at my parents because it was randomly losing its WAN connection to the dsl modem.

i had them return it and got the buffalo whr-HP for less which has been working great
 
spidey07, no SOHO router would survive my evaluation process for production equipment, probably not yours either.

This stuff is cost optimized hardware, shaving every penny possible. It's using cost optimized commodity silicon from a Chinese chip fab and if you're lucky it was more or less engineered in the US, if you're unlucky you're dealing with a Chinese engineer's interpretation of the standards (not knocking nationalities too much, it's just that a language barrier sure isn't going to help things!). And then the software is the same problem as the hardware - if you're lucky they just slapped a quickly hacked embedded Linux on there, if you're unlucky it's more homebrewed.

Admittedly, in my personal experience SOHO gear has been surprisingly reliable. But I don't for a moment doubt that there are a lot of cases of these units suddenly turning flaky or dying, and horror stories of software bugs abound. Chip bugs not so much, but who knows how much is being worked around in software.

Really, what do you expect for $30? It's the same as the consumer PC market. People want cheap, they buy cheap, that's exactly what the vendors give them. If you want enterprise-class gear, you gotta pay an enterprise-class price. Market segmentation.
 
I've been running the same linksys router for 8 years now.
Click to expand...

I must not be livin' right. I'm on my 6th wireless router in 7-8 years. I've been thru all the major brands except Buffalo. They either start to disconnect with regularity, or the wireless portion just quits. I always have a spare router, just in case. This DGL-4300 I'm using now, seems to be the best of the bunch. For some reason, it just seems 'faster'. When this thing quits, I'm gonna be asking JackMDS about the higher quality Buffalo routers.
 
Originally posted by: Old Hippie
I've been running the same linksys router for 8 years now.
Click to expand...

I must not be livin' right. I'm on my 6th wireless router in 7-8 years. I've been thru all the major brands except Buffalo. They either start to disconnect with regularity, or the wireless portion just quits. I always have a spare router, just in case. This DGL-4300 I'm using now, seems to be the best of the bunch. For some reason, it just seems 'faster'. When this thing quits, I'm gonna be asking JackMDS about the higher quality Buffalo routers.
Click to expand...

my parents had a microsoft wireless router for *years*

does mn-500 sound right? i dont feel like looking, but they had it at least 4 or 5 years. it started to become unreliable
 
Originally posted by: jonmcc33
Had a pair of BEFSR41 routers from Linksys. Both were crap and dropped connections and randomly rebooted on their own.
Click to expand...

Geeze. I ran one for three years without issue until my dog decided to chew through the AC adapter cord. Also ran it's slightly upscale cousin the BEFVP41 until we merged with another company, dumped the DSL connection, and moved to a CISCO 2620.
 
I don't know what it was. Even went from DSL to cable and it was just the same. Piles of crap, both of them. A V2 and V3.
 
I went through a few WRT54GS's before giving up on them. My web site traffic was killing them obviously. Went to a D-Link DFL-200 at the suggestion of a friend and even then, my needs have outgrown it.
 
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