You can't make that assumption. It was true years ago but that was during the time period where tech was rapidly changing.
In MANY other areas of business there's a recognition in operations that we often keep old tech running far beyond it's manufacturer's preferred lifetime. I've worked on industrial manufacturing gear that was installed 20 years ago and they still keep it running. IT is so driven by the constant Wintel hegemony but that hegemony is dying which is precisely why Microsoft has moved to subscription products and is pushing Office 365 so hard. They know that they cannot continue to release new and improved software forever. Cisco has figured out the same thing. You can argue hardware gets old and dies but I still have Netgear WNR1000's in service that are 2.5Ghz only running a special compiled version of 19 and God-knows how old those are. The next generation of IT managers and directors going into the large companies are being raised now. 90% of your wet behind the ears IT techs don't have what it takes to be managers - if Cisco tells them "ya gotta spend money on the new tech" they will all believe it. But there is a very slow recognition in enterprise IT and particularly at the CEO level that IT costs can be frightfully expensive and impact the bottom line and cause the business to lose money. That's why CEO's years ago clamped down on production line upgrades and they are slowly clamping down on IT upgrades. I follow what the techs in the trenches are saying and the ones who are smart this way are the ones that are going to be promoted eventually. The ones who just follow the vendor recommendations won't. They don't understand profit and loss in business and eventually, having an MBA will be a requirement for anyone aspiring to be an enterprise level CIO. The vendor hardware party is ending. You probably wouldn't believe my MR-52 flash video has had 2500 views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNg7aIAiV-w&t=4s see for yourself. It hasn't even been up there a year, yet. Don't count on high client-density environments. Adding more radios to the mix mitigates all the advantages of the fancy wifi6. It's basic marketing for Cisco to say "go with our new wifi6 AP and you only need 70% of the Aps that you used to have" That's a selling point when each of your Aps is under the extortion "subscription" model. Obviously I want to see OpenWRT ported to the new hardware but the latest porting efforts now, too much gear seem to start out with: Instruction #1 - heat up your hot air soldering station, desolder the PROM, put it into your PROM programmer and flash in our fixed boot loader.... Rather daunting don't you think? Nevertheless, I did gift myself a hot air soldering station for Christmas.... Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Russell Senior Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2026 3:19 PM To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Router recommendations for pending Ziply Fiber upgrade On Sat, Jan 10, 2026 at 2:32 PM Ted Mittelstaedt <[email protected]> wrote: > You also have to know that wifi6 and wifi7 is almost completely pointless in > the enterprise space. Whether it's pointless or not, deep pocket enterprises will always upgrade, and the last-gen hardware will get resold by the VARs who install the new gear. Whether that decommissioned enterprise gear is useful or not depends on the device and whether firmware replacement is practical. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. As ever, this is a function of opportunistic and motivated reverse engineering. One of the innovations of wifi 7 and wifi 6e are the expansion to the 6GHz band. Also, as of wifi 6, AP to clients can send different data to different clients in the same transmission. These have impact in high client-density environments. The other thing going on, which is reason for some long-term optimism, is that the vendor community is also depending on the FOSS community. They USE OpenWrt when developing their stock firmware. If they choke off OpenWrt, they choke themselves. They don't want to have to develop their own firmware from scratch. -- Russell Senior [email protected]
