Imagine you have to throw out your car after 5 years because the manufacturer stopped updating the software. We are getting there.
5 years is not nice. A large, established company like Cisco, selling devices in an established and very slowly evolving market like routers to companies, should be offering much longer support periods.
Apple supports iPhones for 7 years which I still think is not enough. I think routers for small businesses should be supported for at least double that.
There is physically nothing wrong with these routers. They are perfectly capable doing their job from every possible angle. This is just generating garbage so that Cisco can sell more new hardware that is performing basically the same job.
Using your argument, you could stop all support right after the devices stopped being sold.
So it was being sold for 15 years and the software has been in support for 15 years and it is old so we stop selling it and supporting it at the same time.
Now hope you are not the person who bought it on the last day...
First off, I think this is awful of Cisco, and definitely harms their brand in my opinion. I already didn't think well of them for low-end stuff, though, so it's not like they could do much damage there.
However, this isn't killing the entire router. Just the VPN functionality. If you don't use that, there's no need to get rid of the router. Just make sure the VPN is disabled, as per the article.
If you do use the VPN, then you should either replace the router or implement the VPN differently. Second-hand, that router is still good for anyone that doesn't need a VPN.
When tech is moving fast, I can understand a short warranty, but I don't think routers are in that category. (Wifi routers are, but I've yet to have a Wifi router that could handle my residential usage of it anyhow. They always end up having problems. I've moved to having an access point separately from a router so at least it doesn't kill the whole network when it gets stupid.)
What do you mean "Tech is moving fast"? I am not asking for the routers to be equipped with new features support. Just the features it was shipped with to keep being usable.
One of the main reasons to buy these SMB routers over consumer grade devices is usable VPN support. A lot of those small companies use their routers only for Internet access in their offices plus router-based VPN for remote employee, support or admin access to intranet. In a lot of cases it is essentially the reason to choose these devices over anything else.
Yeah, and it's a bad reason. You can setup a dedicated VPN device with any old computer very easily. It's also way more flexible.
I have a client with a linux host that acts as a fileserver and an ingress point for remote work. No VPN, they just tunnel over ssh to do RDP.
I had my own wifi device, but it took 2 to cover the house. The one I rent from xfinity covers the whole house with one and it's pretty rock solid, so I've stuck with that, although I put a 2nd router behind it with DNS ad filtering.
I think Microsoft has a better approach for Windows. They deliver regular updates for N years, but security updates for a lot longer. I agree it's fine not to deliver regular updates after EOL, but for critical security vulnerabilities, I think they could do a lot better than just 5 years.
After all, it's not exactly environmentally friendly for working hardware to get ditched just because of some software turns it useless.
It's 5 years from End of Sale, and not just 5 years from the initial sale date. It sucks for those that bought the router close to End of Sale, of course.
Don't know for how long these routers have been around, but for one of them I found a overview document dated 2011.
If I buy a washing machine and it breaks after 4 years, it doesn't matter that the model is 10 years old at that point. My rights are from time of purchase.
Should be same for devices. If not, they should at least carry a "best before date" like food, so you know at time of purchase how long you can expect to get updates.
> I mean, isn't it quite reasonable to not update something post-EOL?
EOL isn't real, it's made up. Broken or not powerful enough anymore is real. The town crier could decide to blow a trumpet and proclaim "EOL" a week after the last one is sold.
ofc it's real. They're saying "at this date, we wont update it anymore". The router still works, it just isn't updated anymore.
If i had an old product, there's also some point where i'd say "I wont be updating this anymore", as to phase it out. Expecting something to receive active support forever is unreasonable.
It's real in the way anything I make up is real. It's really made up, and a way to pretend like the product died rather than the support for it.
> there's also some point where I'd say "I wont be updating this anymore", as to phase it out.
You don't get to phase out my stuff. If you're not going to update it anymore, you've broken our support relationship, so you should also be breaking the hardware and software locks that prevent me from getting support from another source.
It’s business hardware so the support term is predictable and known at the time you buy the device. In the case of Cisco it’s 5 years from when the device is discontinued.
But then small businesses like to cheap out and gamble on a device that has a short time of support left and complain when it ends.
This is not a surprise, except if you chose to put on a blindfold yourself. And if you think EOL of 5 years is too short, don’t buy a device with an advertised EOL of 5 years.
