How Old Is My Router — and Does It Actually Need Replacing?

Ask the internet whether your router is too old and you get the same answer everywhere: replace it every three to five years. It is not wrong, exactly. It is just a feeling rather than a test, and it leaves you exactly where you started, because the box on the shelf still has its lights on, the Wi-Fi symbol is still full, and three to five years from what, precisely? The day you bought it? The day it was made? Nobody says.

There is a better question, and unlike the age rule it has a real answer you can go and find. Not "how old is my router" but "is my model still getting security firmware from the company that made it?" That is a published date, not a vibe, and for the three biggest home brands it takes about five minutes to look up. This is how to find it, what it means if you are past it, and the handful of things worth doing to any router this week regardless of what you decide.

The clock that matters did not start when you bought it

Here is the piece that reframes the whole question. Manufacturers do not retire a product based on when you bought yours. They retire the model, on a schedule that starts the day they stop selling it — and they publish that schedule.

NETGEAR states it plainly: "In general, EOS for NETGEAR products occurs three years after the last sale date," and "Products that reach EOS no longer receive firmware updates, including important security updates." TP-Link runs the same shape of policy with different labels: the End of Sales date is when the product is discontinued, and the End of Maintenance date, when TP-Link "will no longer provide support or maintenance for a product," usually falls about three years after that. ASUS publishes a browsable End-of-Life product list for its networking gear, described as models that are "no longer manufactured or updated with firmware and documentation," with a suggested replacement listed alongside each one.

Follow that through and you get the uncomfortable consequence nobody mentions in the five-year rule. A model that came off the shelves in 2022 is out of maintenance around 2025 — whether you bought yours in 2019 or picked one up brand new, still sealed, on clearance in 2023. Buying a heavily discounted router is very often buying the tail end of somebody's support window, and the discount is precisely because the model is being run out. Your receipt has nothing to do with it.

So the age question measures the wrong thing twice: it counts from the wrong date, and it counts the wrong quantity. What you actually want is the support status of your specific model.

Step one: get the model number and the hardware version off the label

Turn the router over. There is a label on the underside or the back with the model number on it, and it is worth photographing rather than copying out, because you will want it twice and half of it is in six-point type.

The part people miss is the hardware version. The same model name is often sold across several internal revisions over the years, and each revision takes its own firmware. TP-Link says to look for a string reading "Ver:" or simply "V" followed by a number — "Ver: 2.0" or "V2" — and notes that a label reading "Ver: 1.2" means hardware version V1.2, with V1.x generally treated as V1. You can also read it inside the router's own settings page, under the firmware upgrade screen on most models.

Get this right before you download anything. TP-Link warns that firmware meant for a different hardware version "can cause compatibility issues," and adds that regional builds are not interchangeable either — the EU and US files for the same model are different downloads. This is the single easiest way to turn a working old router into a paperweight, and it is entirely avoidable by reading one line on a sticker.

Step two: look up whether your model still gets firmware

With the model and hardware version in hand, go to the manufacturer. NETGEAR keeps an End of Service page where you type in the model number and it tells you, and it will send you email alerts about a model's status if you register the product. ASUS keeps its End-of-Life Product List for networking, organised by category, so you can scan for your model and see what they suggest instead. TP-Link publishes its lifecycle policy along with per-model support pages, which is where the hardware version earns its keep.

There is also a fallback that works for any brand, including the ones with no tidy list at all, and honestly it is the check we run first. Go to your exact model's official support or download page and look at the date on the newest firmware. Not the version number — the date. If the most recent firmware anybody has published for your hardware revision is from four or five years ago, you have your answer whether or not the words "end of life" appear anywhere on the page. Software that is being maintained gets released. Software that is not, does not.

Two traps while you are looking. First, use the manufacturer's own site and nothing else. Searching for router firmware surfaces a depressing number of look-alike download sites and "driver updater" tools, and a file from one of those is a far worse problem than an old router. Second, match the hardware revision, not just the model name — a support page can look perfectly current while the firmware on it is for the V3 of a model you own the V1 of.

What an unsupported router actually exposes you to

It is worth being clear that this is a different category of problem from a slow router. Slow is annoying. Unsupported is a security position, and it is one people take without ever deciding to.

Think about what the router is. It is the one device in the house that faces the open internet twenty-four hours a day, that nobody signs into, that has no antivirus on it, that never asks you for anything, and that quietly handles every byte every other device sends. When it stops getting patched, the known holes in it stay open indefinitely — and the holes are known, because that is what a published vulnerability is.

This is not theoretical. In a public service announcement dated May 7, 2025, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center warned that cyber actors were compromising end-of-life routers. The definition it gives is the same one above: when "the manufacturer no longer sells the product and is not actively supporting the hardware," they stop releasing "software updates or security patches for the device." It adds that routers "dated 2010 or earlier likely no longer receive software updates issued by the manufacturer and could be compromised by cyber actors exploiting known vulnerabilities."

What was actually happening is the part that changes how you think about it. Variants of a piece of malware called TheMoon were installing proxies on ordinary people's routers, so that criminals could route their own traffic through a stranger's home internet connection and act anonymously behind it. The FBI notes that the malware "does not require a password to infect routers; it scans for open ports and sends a command to a vulnerable script," and that the compromised devices were end-of-life routers "with remote administration turned on."

Read that twice, because two things follow from it. There is no password to steal, so your excellent Wi-Fi password does not help here at all. And there is no symptom: your internet keeps working normally, nothing pops up, nothing slows to a crawl in a way you would notice. The router simply also works for somebody else. That combination — no password needed, no symptom produced — is why this one is worth ten minutes of your afternoon rather than a note to self.

Three things to do this week, whichever way you decide

These take a few minutes each, cost nothing, and are worth doing even on a router you fully intend to replace — because "about to replace it" has a way of becoming eighteen months.

Turn off remote administration, then reboot the router. It goes by remote management, remote access, or web access from WAN depending on the brand, and it lets the settings page be reached from outside your home. Almost no household has any use for it, it is the common factor the FBI called out in the case above, and switching it off is the single highest-value click in your router's menus. The FBI's own advice on this is to disable it and then reboot.

Change the admin password — the one that gets you into the router's settings, not your Wi-Fi password. A startling number are still on the default printed on the label, which is public information by definition. The FBI's guidance here is a strong, unique password of sixteen to sixty-four characters, which sounds absurd until you realise a four-word phrase you can actually remember clears it comfortably. Put it in a password manager, or write it down and tape it to the router itself; the threat you are defending against is not somebody in your living room.

Install whatever firmware is genuinely available, from the manufacturer's site or the manufacturer's app, matched to your hardware version. If your model is still supported this closes real holes, and it often fixes the flakiness you had half-blamed on the neighbours. If it is not supported, you will discover that while trying, which is the answer you came for.

Where age genuinely does cost you speed and features

Support status is the part almost nobody checks, so it leads. But the standards argument is real too, and it got much easier to follow when the Wi-Fi Alliance renamed everything in October 2018: 802.11n became Wi-Fi 4, 802.11ac became Wi-Fi 5, and 802.11ax became Wi-Fi 6. If your router's spec sheet says 802.11n or Wi-Fi 4, it is old enough to be a genuine bottleneck in a house full of phones, TVs, laptops and doorbells, all of which want a turn.

Security features move with the standards as well. The Wi-Fi Alliance says flatly that "WPA3 is mandatory for Wi-Fi CERTIFIED devices" — so a router that offers you nothing newer than WPA2 in its wireless security menu is telling you roughly when it was designed. Whether that alone is worth replacing a working router over is your call, but combined with an expired maintenance date it stops being a close one.

Two honest caveats before anyone spends money, both of which we would rather say up front than after. A faster router only helps if the devices in your house can use the faster standard too — a Wi-Fi 6 router talking to a laptop from 2016 is still talking at that laptop's speed. And a faster router in the same bad spot does not reach one inch farther than the old one did. If your actual complaint is a single dead room rather than a slow house, that is coverage, not speed, and a new router is the wrong purchase — our guide to mesh versus a single router, and the Wi-Fi coverage calculator, are the right places to start instead.

If the box came from your internet provider, this works differently

A large share of homes around here are not running something they chose. They are running the gateway that came with the service — Spectrum, Cox, Frontier and AT&T are the names most people out here are looking at — and that changes every step above.

You will not find a leased gateway on a NETGEAR or ASUS end-of-life list, because it is not that kind of product. Its firmware belongs to the provider and is pushed to it on their schedule, which cuts both ways: you are genuinely not responsible for patching it, and you also cannot do anything about it if they quietly stop. There is no download page for you to check the date on.

So the move here is a phone call rather than a purchase. Providers routinely swap out aging gateways for current models, and because you never owned it there is usually no charge for the swap. Ask specifically how old your model is and whether a newer one is available for your plan — "it still works" is a different answer to the one you asked for, and it is the one you will get first.

While you are at it, read your bill. Most providers show equipment as its own line item, variously a Wi-Fi service charge, an equipment fee, or a gateway rental. The amount differs by provider and by plan, so look at your own statement rather than trusting a figure quoted on a comparison site. If you are paying every month for a box, you have both more leverage to get a current one and a fair question about whether buying your own would pay for itself. Just go into that deliberately: supplying your own gear means taking on the modem or fibre-terminal question too, and it makes the provider's support boundary stop at the wall.

The Southern California version: it is often where the router lives, not how old it is

Two local things shorten a router's working life out here, and both are about location rather than age. The first is heat. Routers get put in the worst places available — a closed media cabinet, a garage, a utility closet next to the water heater, the top shelf of a hot back office. This is passively cooled equipment with no fan, and a garage in the Coachella Valley or the inland valleys on a 110-degree afternoon is a genuinely hostile place to ask electronics to sit all summer. A router that needs a reboot every few days in August and behaves impeccably in January is not telling you it is old; it is telling you where it lives. Moving it somewhere open and central is free, and it is the fix for a surprising number of "my router is dying" complaints.

The second is a mismatch we see constantly since fibre started reaching more streets here. The house gets upgraded, the plan gets faster, a new terminal goes on the wall — and the same eight-year-old router stays plugged into it, instantly becoming the slowest thing in the chain. If you changed provider or plan recently and the speeds did not change nearly as much as you expected, check what the router is before you get on the phone to complain about the service you are paying for.

If it is time, buy for the house and retire the old one properly

When the answer really is yes, resist buying on the headline number on the box. Those figures are the sum of every band added together under laboratory conditions and no single device will ever see them. What matters is the size and shape of your home, what your devices can actually use, and whether the problem you are solving is speed or coverage.

Then retire the old one properly, which mostly means not being generous with it. Passing an unsupported router down to a parent or a college student, or selling it on, does not make it supported — it just moves the exposure to someone with less inclination to think about it. If it is a leased gateway, return it, both to stop the rental and to avoid an unreturned-equipment charge. If you own it, factory-reset it first so your Wi-Fi password and any settings go with it, and take it to an e-waste drop-off rather than the bin.

How we can help

Most of this is genuinely a do-it-yourself job, and we would rather you did it than paid anyone. The value is in the lookup and the three settings, not in buying anything, and we do not sell hardware — so when we tell you a router is fine, that is not a sales position.

That said, it is a quick and useful visit if you would rather not dig. We look after home and small-business networks across Southern California and the Coachella Valley, and this one takes us very little time: find the model and hardware revision, check where it sits in the manufacturer's support cycle, shut off remote management, get the admin password off the factory default, apply any firmware that exists, and tell you honestly whether the box is the problem or the cupboard it lives in is. If it does need replacing, we will size it against your actual walls and your actual devices, get it set up properly rather than dropped in the same corner as the last one, and make sure the old one leaves the building.