Comments on: Do wireless routers degrade over time, and if so, why?

By: JohnIL

JohnIL — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 18:12:16 +0000

Electronics can degrade, especially with temps and humidity affecting electronics. External influences of interference have to be considered as well. Adding smart devices, low energy bulbs that have bad circuits in them can cause severe interference. I bought several CFL bulbs when they came out, going to save the world you know. However the interference coming from them was atrocious and after discovering they were the cause they all had go and I replaced them with traditional incandescent bulbs. Personally, I never liked wireless anything, not wireless routers, Bluetooth, wireless mice or keyboards. They all have problems and nothing is as solid as a wired connection.

By: Al Spizzo

Al Spizzo — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 19:43:03 +0000

Can this problem be addressed using a router booster?

By: Brainstorms

Brainstorms — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 18:23:26 +0000

In addition to ESD damage cited above, you can also experience breakage of the fine wires that join the semiconductor to its package pins, due to repeated thermal expansion/contraction. This can kill PCs that are turned on & off repeatedly — keep your PCs turned on.

You can also experience “dopant migration”, where the dopant elements added to the silicon to make them N-type or P-type migrate through & even leave the matrix, upsetting its semiconductor properties. This effect is increased with temperature, so it tends to kill things that are on all the time, but allowed to overheat.

Cold, steady temperatures are best.

By: Hank Roberts

Hank Roberts — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 14:30:11 +0000

ElectroStatic Discharge : Practical Analog Semiconductor …
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com › … › Practical Analog Semiconductor Circuits
… an example of latent (“walking wounded”) ESD damage.

[PDF]Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) (Rev. A) – Texas Instruments
http://www.ti.com/cn/lit/pdf/ssya010
ESD can have serious detrimental effects on all semiconductor ICs and the system … There is no known practical way to screen for walking wounded devices.

By: Hank Roberts

Hank Roberts — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 14:26:10 +0000

> that could be some kind of religion. Hard to tell.

Nope. I later discovered that the slow degradation I mentioned has a technical name in the semiconductor industry:

https://www.google.com/search?q=semiconductor+wounding

By: bolopunch

bolopunch — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 13:03:51 +0000

just to add,,at work i just replaced the linksys with the same model router but is kept in an old cabinet we found in one office..installed it and BAM!!! works like new again signal is strong again.so again routers fail !give it 3-5 years in my experience.

By: bolopunch

bolopunch — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 12:59:44 +0000

i just trashed my linksys wifi router at work cause signal getting weaker,and just last month my netgear wifi router at home has the same problem..weaker signal overtime for a course of 3-5 years..yes routers do degrade overtime.they are kept clean,room temps 65-75f.both of routers have been bought 1 year apart..yes and both of them are the gigabit type wifi routers..

By: Chris O'Neill

Chris O'Neill — Sat, 02 Jan 2016 02:52:46 +0000

Yes this may be a case of electrolytics strike again. My most recent encounter was with a digital video recorder which runs pretty warm. In spite of this, the designers in their wisdom decided to sit some of the electros pressing against the heat-sinks of power diodes.

Rubbish design just never goes away.

By: Asc

Asc — Sat, 02 Jan 2016 00:32:22 +0000

The first post had it, I think… electrolytic capacitors. Of all of the components inside a router, they are the one most likely to fail, with the shortest specified service life, and the most sensitive to heat (and it gets hot inside the mostly unventilated consumer routers I’ve had). Such failures definitely can be responsible for gradual reduction of range (or speed) over time or other similar issues, as the noise floor gradually rises as the cap becomes increasingly unable to filter it out.

Caps can fail without visible signs, but chances are good that you will find them with bulging tops in any of these degraded-performance routers. If the device is in warranty, then RMA it, of course. If not, open it up and look for bulged caps– if you find them, they are definitely bad, no question about it.

If the caps inside the unit look good, perhaps the ones inside the AC adapter have failed, which would feed increasing amounts of ripple into the router. It can result in decreased stability and even shorten the life of components in the router that are substantially harder to replace than a simple capacitor.

If any electronic device fails or acts strangely, failed electrolytics is a pretty good guess. I’ve had a router with reduced speed, an LCD monitor that would not turn on at all. Both of them were fixed by replacing the bulged caps. I also have a PC PSU that exhibits behavior typical of capacitor issues, and it does have at least one bulged cap. I would bet replacing that cap would fix it too, and I may try it just to find out (I don’t actually need the PSU).

Replacing bulged caps (or unbulged ones that are many years old– you can test these with a capacitance/ESR meter) may or may not fix the device, but you won’t know until you try. Caps are cheap and relatively easy to replace, so why not, if the device is still worth using?

By: Jim Gregory

Jim Gregory — Fri, 12 Sep 2014 13:02:54 +0000

I find this interesting. I myself have been wondering the same this. As the above mentioned thread stated, it’s life cycle. I am a CCNA as well, worked on $10k+ enterprise routers and several WAPs (wifi for business). They just get old and degrade for some reason. My home router is about 5 years old. I get 12 mbps on average on wifi. My actual connection is 60 mbps which i hit easily on Cat5e. I Have done wi-fi interference tests and channel changes to no avail. Trust a tech when they say “that’s just how it is”. I just never bought a new one cause I don’t care is I get 12 mbps to my phone or laptop, that’s plenty for me.