I probably will. The OnHub has performed substantially better than the other consumer wireless routers I've used, and after 5 years it's due to be replaced anyway. Might as well take the discount.
Why is it due to be replaced? Has your bandwidth speed substantially improved to the point that OnHub can no longer keep up? Because otherwise it sounds like you're happy with where you're at. There's no reason to replace a well-functioning device that does everything you need just because it's reached the end of the ever-shortening consumer electronics lifecycle. My own router is about ~7 years old, I have twice the devices connected as I did when I purchased it, and it still handle my 200Mbs broadband just fine among all devices in use.
WiFi isn’t that simple: every generation makes substantial improvements in things like how they handle contention with multiple clients or interference. Since most of us have more than one device active these days, that is noticeable — especially if you have devices which also talk to each other rather than exclusively over the internet.
When I replaced my 2016 OnHub + Google WiFi mesh with an Eero WiFi 6 system, I saw across the board improvements in latency and bandwidth from almost every client (faster ones more than doubled). We also lost the sporadic hangs for iOS devices which Google never fixed for totally innocent reasons.
I think that what is simple for me is that I don't make those judgements based purely on age. If I'm not having noticeable problems with a 6-7 year old router then I'm not going to write off forced obsolescence as "well it was time to upgrade anyway". I already get the full 200Mbs speed that I pay for and 15-20ms ping & low jitter. Upgrading isn't going to do a lot for me.
Everyone is able to make their own determination on that sort of thing, when they should upgrade. Or at least they used to be able to do that for this product class. Google is now baking in expiration dates that aren't even published at the time of purchase.
I’m not defending Google but almost everyone I know who replaced a 6+ year old router then spends a month saying they should have done that sooner because the differences were noticeable. Given how heavily most people use WiFi now, spending something like $0.50 per day for your entire family seems like far from the most pressing area to economize.
The other thing to consider is how the rest of the market compares: a lot of people have routers which still work but are no longer secure, so this entire field seems right for a legal requirement of, say, a decade support period and/or mandatory recycling.
$0.50/day seems like a small thing until you're strapped for cash but all of a sudden have to pay $500 all at once to replace your Google mesh network hardware.
That aside, as much as this particular example frustrates me, it's not my primary concern: It's the overall trend of forced obsolescence taking yet another step forward and increasing issue of e-waste.
Mandatory recycling is also problematic. It could mean that products that might have ample community support (e.g., via OpenWRT) would still be illegal, and in general would take away a user's right to support & maintain their purchases. It is also something that would be ripe for regulatory capture.
Separate from those issues is the consumer's ability to make an informed choice: A product with a potential expiration date should be required to market it as such. Google does this with Pixel phones; hopefully after this they will begin doing it with their other products as well, and I think that in general it should be required: MS does this with Windows, plenty of other vendors do it, there's no reason it can't be a universal requirement as part of consumer protection laws.
> $0.50/day seems like a small thing until you're strapped for cash but all of a sudden have to pay $500 all at once to replace your Google mesh network hardware.
You're using a definition of “all of a sudden” meaning “at some point within the next year or so”? Think about how much the average person will spend on their ISP bill in that same timeframe — again, I don't think this is great but it doesn't seem that dramatically different from, say, what happens when you have to replace your router in a hurry because Linksys orphaned it and your ISP is going to yank access due to an unpatched vulnerability.
> Mandatory recycling is also problematic. It could mean that products that might have ample community support (e.g., via OpenWRT) would still be illegal, and in general would take away a user's right to support & maintain their purchases.
I think you misunderstood the concept: requiring the manufacturer or reseller to recycle products which would otherwise end up in a landfill when people don't want them any more wouldn't in any way force the owner to turn over a device they want to keep. More importantly, building incentive structures around this would do something about the 99.995% of devices which were never going to get community firmware support.
Similarly, I doubt simply advertising expiration dates would have changed this: Google never said they were offering lifetime support for OnHub and very few people would expect them to offer support massively longer than the rest of the field when things like the WiFi standards improve more frequently than that. If they'd said “7 years of support”, I doubt it would have changed many decisions.
Did you notice those improvements or did you just do benchmarks to see if they improved? Not everyone's needs are the same of course, but I have no complaints about my seven year old Nighthawk R7000. Latency-sensitive devices like game consoles are ethernet, phones and laptops are 5GHz, and everything else is 2.4GHz.
I found it noticeable for anything latency sensitive - conferencing, Terraform/SSH, etc.
(losing Google’s iOS hangs was extremely noticeable, of course, but that’s for a different reason)
The key thing to remember is that there’s considerable variability across different peoples’ experience. If you live in a widely spaced suburban house, you probably don’t need to worry about interference the way an apartment dweller does or even someone in a city where the neighbor’s property starts a lot closer. The layout and materials used in your house similarly have a big impact on whether your devices are operating on 5GHz close to a base station or 2.4GHz further away.
Since you have your latency sensitive devices on Ethernet, you probably are fine with an old AP. Cables are definitely better but not everyone has permission or a suitable way to run them (my house built in the 1930s did not include spare conduit).
I’m guessing that Google has datamined everything that it could from all of the users who would get something like this, so there is no point financially in supporting it.
Make sure you check out some of the other "pro-sumer" lines first. I moved from a flaky consumer router which dropped Wifi all the time to a Ubiquiti which has been rock solid.
I'm not recommending Ubiquiti specifically given recent events but just using it as an example of a prosumer brand, even a few years old now and it still gets firmware updates, where as my old consumer router would be lucky to get any updates at all.
> Make sure you check out some of the other "pro-sumer" lines first
Unless you enjoy networking as a hobby, I would worry with that strategy that there is a sizeable risk of wasting your time with unreliable devices, with ongoing maintenance work, or having to rework your network in a few years.
My current solution is to buy Unifi UAP-AC-LR (~120USD) and configure it as an access point using the “Unifi Network” app from my phone, and hopefully never touch it again. I have done this at friends, and fixed their WiFi woes, without requiring much of my time (occasional complaints that the WiFi isn’t working, but not due to the device*, just ISP or router issues). Easy to plug the AP into a new router if you change ISP or move houses.
* Well, one device just stopped working with a hardware fault: I think due to being installed in a very hot area. I haven’t had software issues or flakiness. Flakiness is my previous experience of prosumer devices and what I most want to avoid.
Doing exactly this works well, but the other bits of UniFi kindof suck. The desktop software is flaky and I’ve seen some really unreliable firmware updates. The non AP hardware is really overpriced as well
That said, they’re coming out with a “UniFi Dream Router” for $80 (might be more once it goes GA, it’s in beta now via their Early Access program) that has the wifi, gateway, and management all in one device https://dongknows.com/ubiquitis-wi-fi-6-unifi-dream-router-u...
If someone is interested in going all-in on UniFi, their best solution is coming in the form of the Dream Machine Pro SE that can support their camera platform (Protect) along with Network and includes a 10Gb SFP+, 2.5GbE, and a PoE 8-port switch which should be fine for most houses (e.g. 5 wired PoE cameras + 3 PoE APs).
I’ve been into Ubiquiti ever since the OG EdgeRouter, so my current setup is a bit more complex. I’m not happy that they’ve ended support for UniFi Video that I ran for years on a NUC with Ubuntu that also hosts other small home automation stuff and Jenkins. I finally caved and got a Cloud Key 2+ to run Protect, which only runs on their hardware, even though it’s just 64-but ARM. At least it’s fast, I guess. It would be great if they had any real competition in this space, but all the other DIY and enterprise options really suck for cameras. MikroTik is fine for networking gear, and with the prices I’ve been seeing on some wifi mesh systems and even “gaming” routers, people could be getting Aruba Instant On or Ruckus Unleashed systems that would be infinitely better than the junk that they’re passing off as “gaming” routers these days.
Investigators say they were able to tie the downloads to Sharp and his work-issued laptop because his Internet connection briefly failed on several occasions while he was downloading the Ubiquiti data. Those outages were enough to prevent Sharp’s Surfshark VPN connection from functioning properly [0]
Yeah, surfashark takes an extra few minutes to load after you start your machine. Maybe he got over eager. I wonder if he has a good lawsuit case for this "Your honor, I was trying to do crime but the failure of the defendant's product resulted in a life-ruining indictment"
I would suggest taking a look at synology. The 2600ac is going on 6 years old and about to get the latest feature release (1.3) with no immediate plans to eol it. And unlike Google they have a long history of LTS.
This is precisely what I did. My OnHub was having issues about 18 months ago, so I did some research. I was mostly interested in getting a browser-based interface back, push security updates from the vendor, and buying from a company that had a good track record of treating customers well and supporting their products. I picked up the Synology and have been very impressed. It got my family through the pandemic scenario of four simultaneous video conference streams with 30+ participants each with flying colors. This is my third Synology product, and I have an extremely high opinion of them. The other two products are NAS products, and both have been just as bulletproof for me.
How do you find the RF performance? For me the OnHub was vastly better than other home wifi gear I've used, but would consider more trustworthy replacements if they have comparable performance...
I guess I don’t have a ton to compare it to. Installed for the neighbors and they get signal from the office in the front of the house to the pool out back, so good? Before that they had a cambium router running DD-wrt that didn’t have anywhere near the range.
You can also buy multiple, they do mesh networking either wireless or wired. They also just announced a 6600 that supports WiFi-6e.
I have some power tool from the 60, with a deviation of precision about a 1/100mm from manufacturing time, while abused in factory. Heck, I just got a new drill from 1959, with the same. They were also “recent” design at the time…
But if you are living with the current performance just fine, why do you have to seek a faster one.
As long as I can work, play 2 concurrent movies while having videocalls at the same time, I don't see the point upgrading just for the sake of upgrading. Unless the security of my devices is at risk.
The best move is to add cables where possible. I’ve got a slightly upper scale consumer mesh network (with Ethernet backhaul) for anything that moves, everything else is connected via cables (have to admit that I only had to draw one cable from the fiber outlet to the other side of the room where an Ethernet outlet was ready) and gigabit switches, both of them at a very low cost. I get almost the same speed and latency at any wired device as I do at the router, even though the cables going to the rooms are 10+ years old.
Unless you’re living out in the wild with no devices to interfere, speed and reliability will be well worth the effort and save a lot on ineffective Wi-Fi gear.
If a network-attached device is always in one place and it has an ethernet port, it has a cable.
If it's always in one place and it doesn't have an ethernet port, there's a cable to the wireless point in that room or the next.
5-port gigabit switches are about $20 each. A 12-port gigabit switch anchors the whole thing. None of them take configuration.
This is harder but not impossible for people who live in apartments; white cable run along the edge of the ceiling or along the foot of the wall is a good bet.
Definitely this. I use any time where I have to open a wall as an excuse to put Ethernet in it. Bathroom getting renovated? Great, use the opportunity to run Ethernet up to the second floor. Garage has a drywall puncture with moldy insulation behind it? Great, run Ethernet.
The upside here is adding Ethernet has been very low cost for me: Literally the cost of the cable and the keystones. Downside is I've been here like two years and my Ethernet runs are still somewhat random/piecemeal.
In one case, which has performed surprisingly well for basically the whole two years: I used an existing coax run with a pair of Motorola MoCA adapters, which provides a gigabit connection from my basement to a room that's particularly hard to retrofit a connection to.
Wi-Fi is for guests and smartphones. Ethernet is for life.
Can't recommend this enough. WiFi is great for mobility but it's just not that reliable. For anything that doesn't have to be moving, pull some ethernet to it and be happy for the long haul.
I use the same Linksys WRT54GL since around 2006 and it never drops the connection. I flashed dd-wrt on it back more than a decade ago and it "just works".