New
#1
Intermittent slow router response - old age?
I've read a number of times some unsubstantiated claims that say a WiFi router has a limited lifespan of about 3-5 years, depending upon a few factors (like throughput levels, temperature management, etc). Sometimes you can get them to go for 8-10 years, but generally by then the technology has improved so much you'll want to upgrade.
Occasionally when I'm using my 4 year old router, a TP-LINK TL-WR941ND, it will become sluggish. At times it seems to be coincident with the weather (like very rainy day or hot outdoor temps), but sometimes not. It's actually located in the basement of the multi-family house, in a room that is generally kept at about 72-75 degrees. One thing I do to try isolating the cause is to locally connect to the router via the Admin web portal. I always find that this is sluggish as well. Right there it eliminates the ISP as the cause. If the web pages I'm trying to load are slow, but so are the router admin pages, it has to be the router. I have 2 computers that will demonstrate the sluggishness simultaneously in multiple browsers from different makers, so it's not the computers (which were rebooted to be sure it wasn't them with CPU running too many background processes). Occasionally, rebooting the router helps, but even when it does it is often short lived. And then the next day, miraculously the router is performing A-OK.
I thought that maybe the firmware may have been problematic, as I upgraded to the latest version provided by the manufacturer, and then ran into other problems like suddenly the router is unreachable. I loaded earlier versions of the software, and even went to a DD-WRT version (non-OEM open source firmware), but that seemed to help only for a short while. Eventually I went back to factory defaults and from there did a fresh install of the latest firmware--this helped for a longer period of time, but eventually the router started to behave periodically sluggishly again.
What I'm trying to understand is this--when such a symptom of sluggish performance is being exhibited, is this a sign that the router has "had it?" Time for a new one? Or are there some other factors I may be overlooking?
Thanks.