Router going bad | How long do they generally last?

So, the fact that mine still works and the only thing I need to do is the occasional reboot is that I am playing with house money at this point, huh? Seven+ years and still normally going strong.

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Router going bad | How long do they generally last?
I bought a Netgear Night Hawk AC 1900 about seven years ago.

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Usually not that long!

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My question, could the issue just be the router I have?

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Probably if it gets better after rebooting it. Do you have any devices hardwired? Often the wifi is the first part of a router to start acting up.


The reason consumer routers rarely last long is they do too many jobs. They typically act as a router, wifi access point, switch, firewall, and maybe other functions as well. And while obviously they are generally able to handle all these tasks at once, it is still quite a load to put on one small device that has no active cooling (ie. fans). The various chips may or may not have heat sinks, but they definitely do not have fans because we want our devices to be silent. So eventually after too many heating and cooling cycles, the chips start to essentially tear themselves apart.

I currently have an Asus router on its last legs (it's probably 5 years old), and I will replace it with a Ubiquiti router that doesn't have wifi (I already have 2 Ubiquiti wifi access points).

The netgear, linksys stuff usually last two years before needing replacements. You getting 7 is unheard of.

My AC1900 went out right after 4 years

I think generally the issue with netgear is they run pretty hot, my newest netgear had a dedicated fan which hopefully will give it a bit longer life

Just for security's sake, replace it after they stop updating the firmware. 7 years is way too long to keep one.