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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
That is a fair point, assuming a person knows about the EOL. The article for this is "Support for OnHub routers ending in 2022". If that is the same email subject Google uses for email outreach (assuming they go that far) then it's something that many users would simply ignore, especially since the majority are nowhere near as security conscious as people here in the HN community. So I think there is potential for a sizeable % of owner to have "sudden" expenses.
your ISP is going to yank access due to an unpatched vulnerability.
If it's hardware I get through my ISP then they replace it. If it's not hardware from my ISP, how would they even know? I'm not sure that an uplink from the cable model to WiFi router will give them that info. And even if it did, they'd have no idea if I had simply slapped OpenWRT on the router negating the EOL issues.
I think you misunderstood the concept:
I'm talking about the people who would still want the device. Maybe a small portion, admittedly. My bigger concert is the moral hazard presented by giving OEM's an incentive to have ever shorter & shorter support windows. Just look at the CPU req's for Windows 11: Many millions of pre-8th gen Intel chips have the horsepower to run Windows 11. Just imagine how awful it would be if every system with an older chip had to be tossed in the trash.
Google never said they were offering lifetime support for OnHub and very few people would expect them to offer
That's a reasonable point. But in the vast majority of cases "support has ended" does not mean "your device is now (nearly) useless.".
For things like ongoing patches & similar maintenance, I understand that it can't reasonably go on forever. I do believe that vendors should have to publish their support horizons though. I'm not sure why you don't think this would help: It would tell users upfront, given that more & more of Google's products rely on their cloud support, when it will become a brick. I'm sure that folks who bought an OnHub 3 months ago would have appreciated knowing it would barely last a year.
With the Pixel this provides customers with a very useful piece of information when making a purchase decision. I know I take it into consideration: I just had to upgrade (dropped my phone-- no more crappy minimal cases for me now) and their support horizon was a factor in determining whether I went for a 5a or paid a little extra for a 6. (I chose the 6... better spec's, but I liked the style more too. :) )
So, I think expiration dates-- especially if more prominently displayed than with Pixel phones: think big bold Letters on initial config & an email where the use has to actively confirm receipt... some people will ignore and just click through, but they had their chance so long as Google doesn't bury it in a wall of text.
Still, your point about security vulnerabilities is well-taken. If there was to be any mandatory recycling, it would need be a very generous timeframe. It would be somewhat unique for consumer products, but safety limits on usable lifetime for equipment exist in various industries. I would want regulations to approach the topic with extreme caution though to at least minimize vendor influence.
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.
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"
[0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/12/ubiquiti-developer-charg...
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.
Do they have a unifi version that I can plug in to a wall outlet without having to upgrade everything to PoE too?
Unless you have PoE you can't add a unifi AP for $120 USD. And getting into PoE isn't cheap.
https://store.ui.com/products/u-poe-af
If someone is willing to spend a bit more, the 8 port managed GbE switch with 4 PoE ports is $110: https://store.ui.com/products/unifi-switch-8-60w
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.
You can also buy multiple, they do mesh networking either wireless or wired. They also just announced a 6600 that supports WiFi-6e.
For you maybe.
I think it is nothing like enough. My guitar amplifier is about twenty years old.
My house is thirty and will probably make it to 300 (climate catastrophes wiling)
I do not buy Google products, if I did I would stop.
This whole wireless internet thing is pretty recent and is getting increasingly better every year.
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.
Are people really replacing their home network infrastructure every 5 years?
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.
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.