From exactly 20 years ago:
This had been powering the hard-wired network in the walls of my old Harvard Square apartment ($125/run in pre-Biden dollars, facilitated by an attic above) and failed at some point in 2025. The front of the device was showing only one link light and it wasn’t on a port to which anything was connected. I found to my delight that the GS116 was still made by Netgear(!) and assumed that the new one ($100 for unmanaged) would have the same mounting pattern and, therefore, I could slide it up underneath the desk using the same screws. Sadly, however, they changed the spacing on the mounting holes.
I think that we need to give a shout-out to the Netgear engineers circa 2000 who made a machine that could run almost forever in Internet terms.
(Why didn’t I upgrade to a 10G switch? Xfinity is the monopoly Internet provider in most of Cambridge, Maskachusetts (the officials who wisely run the world’s smartest city rejected Verizon FiOS some years ago) and one is lucky to get 200 Mbits download throughput on their “gigabit” service, which is throttled to 35 Mbits upload.)
There’s working, and supported. Luckily our 12 year old NetGear router is still working and supported with security updates.
In other aging telecom news, my 86 year old mother in Colorado relies on a land line because she can’t hear on an effectively half-duplex cellphone…she hasn’t had service for 19 days and counting. We’re probably going to have to get her voice over net, rather than net over voice (DSL). No one knows how to maintain POTS anymore.