After experiencing a couple of line drops last week, I contacted my ISP, Zen, to see if there was anything going on with the line.
Part of their reply including this observation:
"if you got the router in Feb 2014 that makes the router nearly 8 years old. The normal expected lifetime of a router is around 5 years. While routers have been known to keep working for longer than 5 years and have been known to fail before 5 years, 5 years is around the time where it stops being surprising if the router fails. "

Somewhat taken aback I asked Draytek support for their view on this almost defamatory remark about my 2860n+. You can imagine the noise my jaw made hitting the floor when Draytek replied thus:
" You could upgrade to the latest firmware here; ... Also, this router has been superseded twice since so it's natural for routers this old to slow down in performance, internet speed, etc."

Say what?
Does it need new piston rings? Maybe an oil change would help?

An expensive bit of kit with no moving parts is now obsolete after 8 years?
I can understand Draytek wanting to shift more kit, but at the same time the governments of European countries are urging manufacturers to abandon the throwaway philosophy and make goods easily repairable.
In this case, they're honestly saying that just because it's 8 years old I should expect failure or degradation? Hardly a good advertisement for the build quality of Draytek products!

This was my third Draytek router, as I have moved from dial-up to ADSL to VDSL, and if we ever get FTTP here I might have bought a fourth. Not so sure now. Might as well get a cheapie and replace it every 3 years.

Anyone else got a view on this?

I can sell you a box of fresh electrons to rejuvenate those tired old circuits :lol:

I can understand that an old router will not cope with e.g. internet speeds/throughput higher than its original specification but it makes no sense to me that it would "slow down" due to advancing age :shock:

When I had a 2860 its case turned yellow after a few years, so I changed to black routers and haven't had that problem since.

jrudman wrote:
Draytek said: "Also, this router has been superseded twice since so it's natural for routers this old to slow down in performance, internet speed, etc."

I've noticed that the quality of Draytek's support personnel has degraded somewhat in recent years!

In any case, the 2860 hasn't been moved the "Legacy Products" list ... yet.

LOL. However, I have to defend Draytek support (apart from that recent weird reply).
They spent a huge amount of time helping me config the router to automatically fail over to my backup ADSL phone line when the fibre broadband goes down.

My two pence: we tend to find that power supplies are often the first things to go.
One thing most non-techies don't realise about digital equipment (computers) is that all of the components are analogue with tolerances, and you get drift due to aging of things like the maximum voltage you can store on a capacitor, or the voltage level that will trigger a one/zero or zero/one transition. The closer to the bleeding edge a device runs, the more likely the higher voltages, greater heat and faster transitions that are required, the more likely you're going to get unpredictable results. Breakdown due to electro-static discharge and those weird back-emf problems you get when turning off circuits: they're like the sun on your skin, the invisible damage builds up over time.
Yes, my beard is grey as well.

Are you suggesting that Draytek build their devices to run "close to the bleeding edge" ? Not a recipe for long-term reliability I would suggest.

All those ex-WW2 radio transmitters and receivers I used in the '60s and '70s worked fine - maybe it's time to return to valves :lol: