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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Home routers have a very short life-cycle. Most of them have a median life of < 10 years, and it's reasonable to expect that the majority of them will be upgraded every 20 years or so. It's the other embedded (manufacturing, utility, etc...) devices that have 20+ year median lives that will prevent IPv4 from ever going away. Dual Stack (as the vast majority of Windows/MacOS/Linux/BSD systems are capable of) - creates a nice transition path - slowly but surely more and more IPv6 creeps into DNS/Local Addresses. If you deployed a IPv6 only facing server today - then some 20-30% +/- of your potential customer base wouldn't be able to connect - but that number will go down by 1-2% each year for the next while, until, in 10-15 years, you'll be able to reach 98+% of your audience, so you'll say WTH and go for it.

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I worked IT for years before switching to programming and I’ve almost never seen a home router last 10 years, let alone 20.

I don't think 20 years will happen but I've seen modem/router combos that lasted for ten years. Customers bought them way back when, and never considered buying replacements because they just worked. If all you do is read news and do taxes, you can still get away with 802.11g easily. You can pull about 10 to 20mbps down that, and for many people that's more bandwidth than their ISP provides then with.

Why buy an 802.11ax capable router when the best connection you can get is an 8mbps DSL connection that drops out when it rains?

Even at that price it was cheaper to rent a modem for a buck a month, but some people like to own things, I guess.

This is true but most of the ISPs I worked with (in an admittedly smallish town) would often upgrade for the user every 5 years or so. A lot of the times it was needed as they shipped the cheapest routers they could get, even when it wasn’t they’d roll out new stuff as people called in. 10 years I could see, my mom and dad used the same tiny netgear modem/router for 7 before having me redo their network.

You probably want to upgrade sooner for faster wifi anyway. My router I only just got from my ISP caps out at 100Mbps while the ISP provides gigabit speeds.

I bought 1gbps router in 2011 and still 10gbps is far out, why would i buy a new router? Wifi APs are a different story.

This is true but I think, ime at least, most people don’t buy their own routers and get a cheap modem/router/Wi-Fi ap unit that gets replaced every few years when they experience issues. Then again my experience was It so it wasn’t like the people who never had issues called.

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