Once upon a time - okay 10. 6. 2006 - I got furious!

Two years ago I bought two NetGear WGR 614 v1 routers. One I used 24/7 with 4 devices + two eight port NetGear switchers and one I borrowed to friend, who use it less with only 3 computers. Port 4 not used on "his". I never had any reall issues with them, yet...

Yesterday I talked on ICQ with Big Pope about caps and stuff, and my connection went down. I assumed that this is my ISP again, and don't worried too much about it - there is lot's offline work too, so... Anyway, since the connection won't kick even in next morning, I rebooted few times cablemodem (but ping on router and then cablemodem was good) and finally I rebooted router, witch seems to be working good, yet still... And connection kick for a while AND there was again a problem on port 4 of the 4 port switcher output part of the router!

When I stated earlied in the that I did not have any issues with my WGR614 v1 I did not wanted to elaborate on one problem, that I had and never be able to figure it out, so I won't listed it as problem.
That was - about half or 3/4 year after purchase and install the router become losing sometimes (!) connection on port 4 - I would say the least powered port then. I thought - bad contact. Cleaned, bend the contact to make better contact, inspected again, again measured cables, put new connectors at them again and again... and no help at all.
But suddently - he always did it after some fiddling - the port 4 kicked back in and worked for month's w/o signle issue. Hmmm.



So, I remembered one unhappy complainin user with WGR 614 v4 and his bad caps inside of it and in hurry I opened the router to check out what NetGear come up in v1 - and !dang! - these are Tocon caps! Yep, similar "grade" as G-Luxon, GSC, Evercon, Fuhjyyu and other "worsest of the worse"....





I got a bit more furious and - checked the Pannyes stock of mine. Well, their 470uF 16V ones are 16mm high. There is no more that 12, maybe 13 mm space. So, I checked out and whoa, Samxons GD 470uF 16V fit well.
It should be noted that there are two 470uF ones and two 330uF ones - these are 25V rated, tough there is no 25V on them - nowhere near, 16V ones is more that enought there... I recapped all with 4x 470uF 16V Samxons GD and - turned the router on/off at least 20 times today w/o a glitch - eg. it never lost again the connection on port 4.



I should be happy - after all, 5min of work or something? And problem is gone for good. But all I feel is growing anger at the NetGear designer, who used such caps - Tocons are well-known for his failing - in fact, that is the only one thing one can count on them...

And how the price could increase, if there are used proper caps, like Rubycons, Nichicons or Samxons - when the Panasonic ones are out of question as Panasonic don't make small-enought 470uF ones...?

Now, 470uF 16V Pannyes at http://digi-key.com cost 0.116$ in 1000 pieces volume and I bet NetGear produced much more that 250 units, so their price will be far lowr for sure.
(when one want 25000 of them, it cost only 0.09289 then for general public, NetGear sure could negotiate even lower price...)

Come on, this is four caps per unit and the dang cursed Tocons gotta cost something!

So, I take it, that for NO REASONS NetGear rob their customers by using known bad brand of caps in their units and I bet countless of users pay by their time like me, trying to figure out what the heck is going on with their router - I must consider myself happy, no major problems, but I also did not used much the WiFi part, mostly disabled it, so...


Anyway, since the unit run pretty hot, I decided that it is time for better cooling holes that these very little ones NetGear made:





Hope you like my work, guys

seems like you have a fetish for re-capping stuff!

good work

There probably is a cost reason for them using such poor caps, same as any other piece of kit that does.
If they weren't saving money somewhere then everything would probably come with quality caps as standard.

Silverfox - heheh, just a little... And thanks! But hey, what can I do, when the cursed "thing" does not work reliably anymore other that recap it?


jammin - cost reason? Could be. But I think I elaborated this one in great detail already. So, please, tell me. When one can buy the good cap at for 0.09289$ (for 25,000 of them) - is there a reason to buy crap caps...?

It's business, you'd be surprised how much of a difference a fraction of a dollar will make when you're churning out thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of units.

Every saving made on components turns into more profit at the other end, that's just the way it works I'm afraid.

It is called sensitivity analysis. By reducing the cost of a cap for even a fraction of the cost of a better one, in the long run it could save millions of dollars or pounds. The slightest change can have the most dramatic effect on profits, and profits are all they care about!

To increase profitability, the company starts by reducing production costs - in this case, capacitor costs

I am wandering if this is the reason i get dropouts on my router just on the WAN port happens about twice a week

Well, I can't agree with you, guys, that getting the bad caps cheaper (these cursed Tocons gotta cost something) that the good ones can make so much profit. Back to the calculation. 25,000 caps per 0.09289$ one. That is caps for 6,250 routers. (4pcs in a piece) If the bad cap cost only HALF of the price (I dubt that very much), we go for the price this way:
Good caps = 4x 0.09289 = 0.37156$
Bad caps = 4x 0.046445 = 0.18578$

Difference is 0.18$ on one single router for the 6,250 pieces made. That translated to 1161$ of profit.
Keep in ming the highly unrealistic asumption that the Bad Caps come with helf the good caps price. And also remember that NetGear dealing with factory directly can undubtely negotiate way lower prices that for what is Digi-Key selling caps to general public - not to mention the Samxon caps I used are good and cost even less that Pannyes...

And do you think it is enought to cover the loses when people realize how much they are decieved?


Dr_Frankenstein - if you running the sme router - well - welcome to the club

My suspicion was not misplaced. I thought from beginning that some of the caps are too small in capacity (470uF) and too high on voltage (16V) w/o reason. So I measured and it looks that from the four ones two are regulating/stabilizing voltage before the regulators and two after the regulators. On one of the "after ones" are 1.8V and on next is 3.3V. So a Samxon GD 470uF 16V caps got exchanged for Samxon GC 1000uF 6.3V ones for these positions to get better, cleaner voltage for router chips.

No futher improvement noticed, except a bit lower ping, so...



NetGear WGR 614 v1
--------------------
2x 1000uF 6,3V Samxon GC d8 x 14
2x 470uF 16V Samxon GD/GC d8 x 12

I'd have thought Netgear sell far more than 6,250 per year. If you were to assume they sell 1,000,000 of those a year (no idea how realistic that is) and the price difference is as you say, that would be $180,000 for a single product a year. How many other products do they sell? Say 20. I expect they buy a huge amount of capacitors in bulk, so they try to use the same value capacitor in as many places as possible - hence using a 16v where a 6.3v would be more sensible. Say there's also 4 capacitors in each of these. Say they also sell 1,000,000 of each of these products a year. $180,000 * 20 = $3,600,000 a year.

Probably more than i'll earn in my entire life working

Good math, they cheated themselves a lot of money

Your point is well seen. Still, it does not change my belief that this is almost criminal activity, cheating users on caps. How much people actually even understand what is going on? I bet it is just a very tiny fraction of whole population...

Witch is why people who understand and know what is going on should never be quiet about it.

But then how many people have problems? I'd bet it's also a very small fraction of the entire population.

I had Fuhjyyu caps in my Antec TrueControl 550W. And I think it was Teapo? on the mains side, where others had decent one's there at least! Never caused me any problems, ran absolutely fine for about 4 years.

The only problem I have had with all of my electrical equipment so far is the old S370 MSI board, which locked up a lot until I recapped it. That must have been a good 6 years old or something before it started doing that

Exactly. Choices aren't made lightly.
Sure, sometimes mistakes may be made and poor components may get selected and fail often. But that's when recalls happen.
Everything will likely be thoroughly tested for acceptable failure rates and product lifespan.

If you can get that using super cheap caps, then why not?

Oh, snap...

You both guys SHOULD have experienced the NetGear forum as it was - there was like 10 000 people complaining about the unreliability and getting 3rd or 5th RMA with no solution in sight, etc, etc, etc.

NetGear ended up censoring the forum, only allowing posts they like to be posted in the end.

Crap components always cause these problems, sooner or later. It is still a cheating and producing very unreliable product, sort of criminal activity. NetGear reliability go to hell with it, so, telling me how my router was reliable... well, for like half year, dude!