I came home yesterday to a flatlining cable modem, one of those little RCA/Thomson ones from the cable company. Efforts to resuscitate failed.
We haven’t had this modem very long. The one we had previously lasted years before it failed, while this one lasted probably not even a quarter as long. The difference in usage is that I now have two daughters, along with my wife and myself (rarely compared to them), streaming Netflix, hulu, youtube, and whatever else, often simultaneously. This started shortly before the death of the previous modem. Is all this streaming wearing out something in the modems? It seems unlikely, but I’m not sure.
My cable company says the life of a modem is maybe about two years, and there is very high variability in how long one actually lasts. They come with a one year guarantee.
It’s sort of a truism that consumer networking gear just… wears out over time. Popular geek opinion chalks it up to a combination of time, heat, and poor engineering. Some types of electronic components like cheap electrolytic capacitors will wear out over the years, depending on the conditions. Also, if it’s a wireless router, the background “noise” for the wireless signal increases as your neighbors acquire more and more wireless networking gear.
I’d WAG that this degradation is not directly related to the amount of data that passes through a given piece of gear. There may be some indirect relation to heat production or some other factor. If you use it a lot, it can heat up quite a bit if it’s not adequately cooled. ETA: where inadequate cooling might be due to poor design, high temperatures where you live, or the fact that you might have put it in an unventilated space with a lot of other overheating gadgets.
Modems aren’t directly affected by how much data passes through.
But indirectly, any sort of electronic device can certainly be affected by heat. And the busier the device is, the more heat it will generate. This can be mitigated somewhat by putting the modem in a well ventilated area.
It also doesn’t help that the cable companies don’t generally expect the highest quality or impose the most rigorous standards on their modem providers.
In many cases it is not the modem/router that’s gone bad, but the wall wart.
This is confusing because sometimes a failed wall wart will still put out a few tenths milliamps at the rated voltage, which is enough to light up the LEDs on the router, but other than that it will be unresponsive
This can fool the casual observer into thinking that the power supply is good and there’s some problem with the router, when in reality it’s the other way round.
That is what I came to post. I have a $20 D-Link router that failed yesterday. At first just the WiFi quit working, but the wired connections worked. So I turned the router off and on, but it wouldn’t turn on, no lights at all. I replaced the power cord with one from an identical router and it worked fine. Thing is, the router/power cord was only about a month old.
You can buy your own modem (of higher quality) and use that, instead of the super-cheap one the cable company gives you by default.
I have a Motorola one like this model (actually the older version of same in a square case). It’s tough as snot and will probably outlive me.
Just make sure, before you buy, call the cable company with the model number and make sure it’ll work correctly with their network. (It should; they virtually all use the same standard.) As an added bonus, you save a couple bucks a month for “modem rental”.
But generally, no the power usage is constant, and the life time is the same whether they are on or off.
Actually a single cool down an warm up (an off, stay off for a whle, then back on) is more damaging than weeks of being on constantly, as the circuits may fatigue due to thermal expansion/contraction.
( Perhaps modems die when they get cooked in the middle of summer though ?)
You definitely need to check with the cable company. I have Comcast at both home and the office. At home, I’m allowed to buy my own modem and did so. I bought a second one for the office connection (which got set up a month or so after the home one), only to be told by Comcast that they don’t allow third-party modems for business service, only for home service.