The router keeps working long after it stops being safe

A router is the only object in the house that becomes less safe as it ages while looking exactly the same. A kettle that is failing leaks. A boot that is finished lets water in. A router that stopped receiving security updates three years ago lights up the same four lamps, carries the same traffic at the same speed, and gives no sign at all. That is why most homes are running one.

So the durability question for this shelf cannot be answered by handling the object. It has to be answered by a date.

The number is the support period

Every other record in this catalog asks what fails first and whether it can be serviced. A router inverts that. The hardware rarely wears out — the firmware simply stops being maintained, and from that day forward every vulnerability found in it stays open on your model.

The useful figure, then, is the defined support period: the length of time the manufacturer will provide security updates. Not the warranty. Not the Wi-Fi generation. Two routers with identical Wi-Fi 6 radios can differ by five years on this one number, and nothing on the box will tell you which is which.

Until recently that was a fair complaint, because the number was rarely published. It is now.

Since 29 April 2024, it has to be written down

The UK’s Product Security regulations came into force on 29 April 2024, and they are unusually direct about this. The defined support period must be published. It must be accessible, clear and transparent; available without prior request; in English; free of charge; obtainable without handing over personal information; and — the clause that matters most to a non-specialist — “understandable by a reader without prior technical knowledge”.

Two further provisions give the number its weight. If a maker extends the period, the new one must be published as soon as is practicable. And the requirement is not met if the defined support period is shortened after the publication. A published date cannot quietly be walked back.

The practical consequence for a buyer anywhere is larger than the jurisdiction suggests: manufacturers do not usually build a separate model for one market, so a period published for the UK is generally the period for the same model everywhere.

This is the rare case where the evidence a catalogue like this normally has to assemble — warranty PDFs, parts-retention policies, service networks — has been replaced by a single sentence the maker is obliged to write down. The work left for the reader is only to go and read it.

What the date does to cost per year

The arithmetic is unkind and very short. Take a $200 router:

• updates end after three years — $67 a year
• updates end after five years — $40 a year
• updates end after eight years — $25 a year

The hardware is identical in all three lines. Only the date moves. This is why the support period belongs beside price on the same page of the notebook: a cheaper router with a short period is routinely the more expensive object, and the difference is not recoverable by careful use, because no amount of care extends a firmware clock.

It also reframes the upgrade question. The honest trigger to replace a router is not that a faster standard exists. It is that the published period has run out.

The clock a company does not hold

There is one route out of depending on any maker’s promise, and it is worth naming rather than gesturing at.

The OpenWrt project — the long-running community firmware for network hardware — designed its own router, the OpenWrt One. Two things about it belong in a record like this. Its schematics and datasheets are published by the project, which is the network equivalent of a maker publishing its parts diagrams. And it boots with a failsafe NOR recovery flash alongside its main storage, so a bad firmware write can be undone rather than ending the device. A router built to be reflashed indefinitely, by a project rather than a company, has a support period bounded by interest rather than by a business decision.

The honest counterweight, stated as plainly: its hardware page documents no warranty and no spare-parts commitment, and it expects a user who is comfortable with OpenWrt. For a household that wants the router to be an appliance it never thinks about, that is the wrong trade, and a mainstream maker with a long published period is the better purchase.

The check to run this week

Before any of the above becomes a purchase, run the check on the router you already own, because the most likely correct outcome of this record is that you buy nothing.

1. Find the model number — it is printed on the underside of the box.
2. Look for the maker’s published support period for that model. It is required to be free, unrequested, and readable without technical knowledge.
3. Compare that date with today.

If the date has passed, you have found a genuine replacement trigger. If it has not, the router owes you the rest of its period, and the shelf gains nothing from replacing it early. And if the maker publishes no date at all for a product still being sold, that absence has told you what the specification sheet would not.