We are all so dependent on routers now in order to gain access to our digital music, so when your router goes down the music stops!! They are of course as a general rule very reliable.

Last night, at closing time, a client of ours was in a panic as she could not play her music stored on her NAS and she had a party starting at 8pm. We closed the store at 5.30 and paid her a visit to find out the router had packed in.

We returned to the store and took back the showroom router and got all the music and internet up and running by 7pm. Had to stay for a bit of the party!

Moral of the story;

Consider buying 2 routers with both of them pre configured and keep one as a spare. Then if one breaks you have a spare and can be up and running within minutes.

Why have your £5000 or more system stop working, when for the price of a spare router (£50-£150) you will have more reliability and piece of mind? Also all your computers will continue to function!

I can vouch to this, broadband/wifi routers are almost all crap, or seem to be! I know I've bought two of them as a student!

Not a bad idea!

But I would check the power supply before throwing old routers away - these are often the culprit, and you can get universal adaptors quite cheaply!

I'd take it a step further and have an identical system waiting in the cellar in case anything goes wrong. So far response to this idea has been luke warm. 

TripEnglish:

I'd take it a step further and have an identical system waiting in the cellar in case anything goes wrong. So far response to this idea has been luke warm. 

You are right Trip, if I can try and get to the inner meaning/sarcasm/irony/mockery of your message, were do we stop. 

The point was that a relatively cheap piece of kit is responsible for the correct operation of many cruicial items on a network  PCs, CCTV, NAS the list goes on.

A similar approach is taken with the use of UPS, although your reply to that would probably be along the lines of "Why don't you go the whole hog and build a power station next door."

So far my response to your posting is distinctly frosty! ;)

I have to say the only router that ever failed on me was a WAG200g - and this I am 99% certain BT somehow blocked as for a start a bloke had been working on the telephone line a day before and also I had to get a BT approved router to guarantee it would work!

I agree above the Power supply would be the first thing I would substitue!

I've never had one go wrong. I only changed when I went back to BT and they insisted on sending me the new home hub. I've still got my old DSL2740B as a backup but have not needed it.

Once I got a rogue ADSL filter identified and sorted I have been very happy with the BT Home Hub.

The BT helpsystem........now that is another matter!!

Most Zyxel P660 series routers (incl. mine) have a nice habit of momentarily dropping the ethernet connections every now and then after they get to be a couple of years old. If you only use the wireless or just browse the web you might not notice it.

I was just being glib. 

I think that it's a good idea and any dealer that does larger installations knows that it's the $50 box that brings down the whole system. We routinely leave a router, baluns, and an extra booted cable box on larger job sites. Each project calls for its own redundancies, but these cheap accessory devices will ultimately crap out with irritating frequency and this makes service calls or even walking a house manager through a swap much easier.