Reasons to Change Your WiFi Router at Home and Buy a New One

The router is the most important element in the home local network, it is in charge of establishing communications with the Internet and also communicating the different devices connected to the home local network. Of course, the router also provides us with many services in our home or office, such as VPN servers, print servers, Samba and FTP server, among many other services. An outdated router can ruin our experience with the Internet connection, especially when it comes to the Wi-Fi network.

Reasons to Change Your WiFi Router

With the same connection, if we use a quality router we can see a great improvement in web browsing, but much more in Wi-Fi coverage and the speed obtained, likewise, we can also notice a difference when playing online. In this tutorial we will explain the reasons why you should change your home WiFi router every two years.

A very important detail is that we should not consider our router as a team that we configure the first day, and we already forget about it, it needs a certain maintenance in terms of firmware updates. It is not enough to turn it on, off or restart it from time to time, you have to worry about more things. For performance and security reasons, we will see that a good policy is to change your router every two years or so.

The importance of doing a good initial router configuration

Cybercriminals are always on the prowl and we don’t want to give them opportunities to profit from us. Today we must be aware that at any time we can be victims of a phishing attack, ransomware, any other type of malware and more. They can also try to connect to our Wi-Fi network simply to surf or steal our most confidential data.

For that reason, from the beginning we must implement a local network as secure as possible. Some basic safety tips that we can take as a starting point would be:

  1. Change the password to access the router that comes by default. In that sense, it should be noted that password leaks sometimes occur. They could also try dictionary or brute force attacks with the more common default passwords. Some routers have a captcha that adds additional security against dictionary attacks or brute force, if your router has this option, you will be more secure regarding possible intrusion attempts on the firmware of the equipment. In addition, other models have a system that blocks login attempts when the password is entered incorrectly on 5 or more occasions.
  2. Changing the Wi-Fi password is another very important element. If it is a dual band router, we change the password of the 2.4 GHz band and the 5GHz band. In short, we must change all the passwords that we have in the router, both the administration and the Wi-Fi network.
  3. The importance of choosing good encryption to maintain security. In this minimum case WPA2-Personal and if it supports WPA3-Personal even better, but remember that WPA3 may not be compatible with your client device, for this reason it is very important to check that all equipment supports it.
  4. Only open the ports that are needed from the router.
  5. Disable UPnP on the router.

As for that password or Wi-Fi key that we are going to create, it also has to have some characteristics. The first thing to be robust must contain at least 12 characters. Second, that password must include numbers, uppercase, lowercase, and symbols. Finally, it is recommended that we periodically change these passwords, both the administration and WiFi passwords.

And with that we are safe? The answer is yes, but temporarily. This implies changing your router approximately every two years in most cases if we want to be sure, many manufacturers launch a new router and we have about 2 years of firmware updates, until they consider it to be “End of life” and no longer launch new ones. firmwares with security patches. We must bear in mind that our router is the core of the network, and the one that is responsible for protecting us from external attacks that come from the Internet. There are router manufacturers who take security updates and new features very seriously, ASUS, NETGEAR and AVM with their FRITZ! Box routers, release many firmware updates improving their equipment, and these routers age much better than others.

The router ages faster than it seems

Generally we are not aware that the passage of time also affects our router. We may not realize it because we have no news about it. In a PC every year we see a new generation of processors from Intel and AMD come out. Also, as we use our PC or laptop practically every day, and we see when it is getting outdated. Something very similar also happens with a smartphone, every year we attend the launch of Qualcomm and Mediatek CPUs. The difference with a PC or laptop is that since they cannot be expanded and new connection technologies such as 5G appear, they become obsolete before.

On the other hand, the PC or laptop, thanks to its possibility of expansion, can last us longer. In that sense, we can change the hard drive for an SSD or expand the RAM and notice significant changes. Regarding the Internet connection section, it does not depend on them generally, although it is true that you can replace the WiFi network card with a better one with the Wi-Fi 6 standard. In most cases, the Internet connection depends on a router or access point. In case of not being able to take advantage of all the bandwidth, we could always improve the situation by changing the network card or the Wi-Fi card. Also regarding the software we can keep the computer safe with updates to the operating system and a good antivirus.

On the other hand, a router and a smartphone suffer more over time. In a sense, we could consider both with many things in common. Among them would be their lack of expandability and that they have more limited software support than a Windows computer. The difference is that we use a smartphone daily, and we are noticing that it is slowing down day by day. On the other hand, the router is a static element that we use indirectly, and that we are only going to worry about when there are problems.

However, there are a number of considerations to keep in mind about routers:

  • The different new Wi-Fi standards that could give us a higher speed.
  • The different types of antenna and configuration that they can have and their range.
  • The Ethernet ports and the different speeds they can offer, in recent years the Multigigabit NBASE-T ports are being promoted.
  • The firmware update, or what is the same, the support offered by the manufacturer.

In the end, for the reasons mentioned above, changing your router every two years can be a good idea, although year after year there are new routers on the market with better Wi-Fi, more and faster Ethernet ports, and even better processor to share. data via USB 3.0 at high speed, the difference in performance from one year to the next is not as high as it happens every two years, something similar happens with smartphones, although there is a difference generation after generation, it is not worth renewing each year the mobile.

Different Wi-Fi standards, speed, range, and more

The 802.11 standard is a family of wireless standards created by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Currently our home routers can support these standards:

  • The 802.11b approved in 1999 and that works in the 2.4 GHz band. Its maximum transmission speed is 11 Mbps. In real life this maximum speed is reduced by approximately 5.9 Mbps.
  • The 802.11g standard approved in 2003 also operates in the 2.4 GHz band. It was approved to achieve a theoretical maximum speed of 54 Mbps. However, the actual average transfer speed is about 22.0 Mbps.
  • The 802.11n standard was approved in 2009. One fact that we must comment on is that it can work in the 2.4 GHz band and the 5 GHz band simultaneously. A theoretical speed of 800 Mbps can be achieved with four antennas, although the normal thing is that a speed of approximately 250 Mbps real is obtained.
  • The 802.11ac standard that was approved in 2014 and works in the 5 GHz band only. As a maximum speed we could theoretically reach rates of 1.3 Gbps using 3 antennas, or 1.7Gbps if we use 4 antennas. The real speed that we can achieve is around 800Mbps real approximately.
  • The 802.11ax standard approved in 2019 is prepared to operate in the 2.4 GH and 5 GHz bands. It is popularly known as WiFi 6 and can reach up to 4.8 Gbps of theoretical transfer using channel widths of 160MHz, in this article we have been able to get up to 1.1Gbps of real speed via Wi-Fi.

As you can see, every 3 or 4 years approximately we have a new standard regarding Wi-Fi, but within each standard we have different phases approximately every two years that improve it. With each of them there is a significant jump in terms of speed, and with Wi-Fi 6 we have a very important jump in terms of the efficiency of the wireless network.

However, another thing to keep in mind is that if we choose the Wi-Fi 6 standard, not all routers would get the same speed. This is because manufacturers launch different versions with different number of antennas, the high-end currently have 4 MU-MIMO antennas, and the top of the range have support for 160MHz channel width. Other improvements introduced by the manufacturers of routers, is the possibility of using other routers or Wi-Fi repeaters forming a Wi-Fi Mesh network with WiFi roaming and band-steering, manufacturers such as ASUS or AVM allow you to create Mesh networks with WiFi routers, with its AiMesh and FRITZ! Mesh technologies respectively.

Therefore, Wi-Fi is constantly evolving and if you want to enjoy maximum speed, you have to change your router every two years or so.

Wear and tear on the router and Ethernet ports

The router is currently a computer that is working 24 hours a day. It is no longer like the ADSL routers of yesteryear and the first fiber routers that came with a separate ONT. This implies that currently, in most cases, we cannot turn them off because if not, we will be left without a phone. As a consequence of the fact that we cannot turn them off, and that they offer us more and more things, they suffer greater wear and tear. One of the main enemies is the heat that is generated inside the routers. With the passage of time, little by little, it will take its toll on its internal components.

One of the sections that usually affects you the most is Wi-Fi. For this reason, in some routers only the Ethernet or Wi-Fi part ends up working if we are close. A good practice would be to turn off the Wi-Fi, this achieves lower temperatures and a little less internal wear on the components. In this sense, most manufacturers have a WiFi programmer to help us automate this task.

Therefore, if your router has a Wi-Fi timer it is good to program it. Thus, we avoid wear to the router and save some energy. Manufacturers offer a two-year warranty as a general rule. From that moment is when the first problems can begin to appear, and that is why it is a good choice to change your router approximately every two years.

Regarding the Ethernet ports, most of the current routers are Gigabit Ethernet, however, with the arrival of the new FTTH connections at 1Gbps real, we will have to change the router to one with support for Multigigabit Ethernet, where we can reach speeds of up to 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps and even directly to 10G networks to power our home local network when using NAS servers with this type of ultra-fast connectivity.

The importance of firmware update

As we mentioned before, the warranty of our router by default is usually two years. Software support in the form of firmware updates typically lasts for about a similar period. In general, we will have a support of between 2 and 3 years. However, there are some manufacturers that offer more time such as ASUS or AVM. It is also a very important thing when evaluating the purchase of a router. The reasons these firmware updates are important are because they provide us with:

  1. Correction of security flaws.
  2. Better protection of our Wi-Fi network by solving problems found and new attacks.
  3. Sometimes, new functions are added that were not at the beginning and that are very useful.

This means that when a couple of years have passed, our router is no longer as secure as it was at the beginning. Security is one of the factors that makes us think that changing your router every two years or so is a good idea.