My trusty gigabit Belkin N1 Vision router decided to croak two days ago.
At the time of purchase (Aug’ 08) this was one of the first N-draft gigabit routers on the market and accordingly came in at a hefty price of R 2,700. I am not sure if the sudden death was related to the firmware I installed in November, or if the router didn’t want to shuffle gigabytes around anymore.
Lightning was certainly not the cause, since any electrical surge has to travel past an APC surge arrestor and then through an APC Back-UPS C350. Somehow it appears that the router’s firmware got corrupted as it kept rebooting itself and even a hard-reset did not convince the Belkin to reset to factory defaults.
The one thing you might not know is, that every Belkin router has a life-time warranty and as long as lightning does not blow up your equipment, Belkin will repair it or replace it.
Even more surprising was, that when I went to Incredible Connection today to send the router in, they went and gave me a brand new one over the counter. I didn’t even have to provide the packaging and I walked out with a brand new and shrink-wrapped model.
So don’t be tempted as I was and chuck the router in the dustbin, go to the place where you bought it and ask for a replacement, as it has a lifetime warranty. (If you struggle, let me know, I have a few contacts to get you sorted)