The week my networking equipment died all at once

Last month my router, switch, and modem all failed within 48 hours, right when I had a deadline for a big project. I spent $400 on replacements and three nights troubleshooting with no backup gear on hand. Has anyone else had their entire home setup crash in a chain like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

sullivan.quinn21d ago

Honestly I gotta push back on this "chain reaction" idea. You had three separate pieces of gear that were probably all old and beat up at the same time, not some magical curse. If you'd kept spare cables or a cheap backup router in a drawer you could've been up and running in 20 minutes instead of three nights of PANIC.

lee58221d ago

Read somewhere that gear from the same year tends to die around the same time if it's all cheap consumer stuff. Your modem and switch might've been running on borrowed time together, you know? Unlucky timing but not really a curse.

abbyhall21d ago

Yeah that makes total sense honestly. I had a similar thing happen with a cheap router and a modem I bought the same year, they died like a month apart. I started keeping a spare power strip and an old router in a box just for this reason. It's not rocket science, just having a backup can save you from that whole scrambling around at 10pm thing. Plus cheap consumer gear has that planned obsolescence built in, you know? They're not built to last 5 years, they're built to last 2 if you're lucky. So yeah, unspoken curse or whatever, it's just bad luck with junk hardware.