Think you bought a router? Was it a Belkin? Well, the outage on 10/7/2014 proves that you really don’t own the router that you purchased. For some mysterious reason, ALL belkin routers in several countries stopped working suddenly.
Apparently these Belkin routers ping a server somewhere in belkin land somewhere. If it receives no response, it disables your DNS services, which effectively disables your internet. Nice!
I wonder why they though it would be a good thing for a router to ping their network all day long. Then if it doesn’t receive a reply, shut down? This is insane.
What is the solution?
First, you should dump the Belkin router. In fact, you should never consider another Belkin router. This includes Linksys right now, since they apparently are also made by Belkin.
Second, you should get a better router. What is a better router? One that doesn’t randomly shut down your service because someone at Belkin pushed the wrong button! My favorite brand right now is Ubiquiti Networks. I own the Airrouter HP, but this Airrouter would work just fine for most people: Airrouter At Amazon. This is a commercial router that can work well in a home environment. There are many more features than I’ll ever use, but at least this has been the most stable router I’ve ever had.
Just a note that Belkin acknowledges that there was a problem, and the solution was to change to public DNS servers. But it took them 15 hours or so to solve the problem. Fun.
