Consumer routers are bad hardware. Does someone make a small wireless router that's not a piece of junk? In four years I've had three of these things burn out on me. A Netgear RT314 (flaked out), a Linksys WRT54GS v1.1 (crippling software problem) and now, a Linksys WRT54G v2.2. The last one had about a year of service before it flaked out. First the wireless was unreliable, then two days later it reset itself entirely every few minutes. They're entirely solid state, what's to fail? Maybe overheating?

This time around I bought a Buffalo router. It claims to support MIMO and 6x the Wifi range, whatever the hell that means. The software and manual are awful. 20-70 second random delays on every configuration change, a 1980s era Chinese bitmap font, weird things like port mapping being called "Internet gaming configuration". But it works.

Instead of $70 for a router that sucks and will break after one year, I'd gladly pay $150 for a good router. Does that market exist?

Update: Marc points out that Apple's Airport Extreme is about what I'm asking for. $180.
techbad
  2007-01-16 20:09 Z