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Re: [LUG] Netgear Router

 

On 10/11/17 17:53, Andrew Kendall wrote:
"maybe someone else will chime with a balancing opinion and tell you that I'm overstating 
it," if only you were!!!

I can only, sorrowfully, confirm that most ISP supply cheap, cr*p quality routers. 
I've just moved to EE Broadband and their BrightBox 1 is, in my opinion, the worst 
I've ever encountered. And after a lifetime as a Network and Security Engineer I've 
seen some garbage.

It's the usual story, you mostly get what you pay for. If you can afford the cost, 
time and effort to buy and support one, I'd buy a Juniper router, or maybe a Cisco, 
both professional, commercial quality routers that will do anything you could ever 
want.

Coming down-market, I've had a couple of Draytek routers, latest was a Vigor 2830n, does 
wifi and a lot of quality features well, but was well over Â100 at the time.

Netgear do some fairly good quality ones at their dearer end, but, as with ALL the 
above equipment, you MUST stay on top of the patches and firmware upgrades, and keep 
the config similarly relevantly configured. (You patch your platforms and PC's don't 
you?)

There are just too many exploits, vulnerabilities, and holes being discovered all the 
time not to keep your router up to date. And the shabby shameful grossly naÃve 
quality of the host of software engineers out there are to blame. Combine that with the 
fact that the ISP business is so cut-throat now that they can't/won't afford decent 
hardware for their users and you begin to understand why there are so many problems.

I think that covers it.



Cheers
Thanks, that was all very interesting. As a follow up to all this, today I had a chat with my ISP (Zen Internet) about this. Among other things they did check for me if Netgear had upgraded their software on my router model. Not for the last three years it seems.

So they (Netgear) are not bothering to keep their older routers up to date. I will definitely check out some of the companies mentioned in your email. Perhaps it is an area where it pays to spend out. As my dad used to say, sometimes the dearest thing you can do is buy cheap.

Neil

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