Routers also tend to be used by small businesses that stick them in a closet and forget they exist, or large businesses that can't afford the downtime of replacing the whole stack. I suspect a lifetime of 5 years is actually on the low end.

That's more or less what I tried to say. Assuming a five-year lifetime shows a lack of knowledge of how the product is typically used.

Incidentally, my own upstream uses a twelve-year-old router. I know where it is but I'm not sure that cupboard has been opened this year.

>Assuming a five-year lifetime shows a lack of knowledge of how the product is typically used.

a five-year lifetime is is business decision balancing customer expectations and maintenance cost (including keeps a hardware stock of these routers in each continent, sometime even in country for specific countries, keep development alive, etc.).

You may say they underestimate the willingness of their customer to buy a new router after 5 years, but they definitely know that a huge proportion of their customers are running woefully out-of-date and unsupported hardware/software.

Same for all on-prem vendors and a major reason why moving customers to cloud is so appealing for so many vendors.

I used to work at a small shop and we would sell stormshield small-biz routers. The typical time we'd sell to the client was 10 years, and the old routers we would cycle out were about 7-12 years old (by that point considered really old). If i sold a router to my client and 5 years later it's EOL, that client is not gonna be happy with me.

How else is the Cisco executive team supposed to get paid?

It's even worse in the concept of `router == firewall`

If you buy one of the popular firewalls, you need a subscription for it to actually work. Once it's expired, you lost your web filtering and IPS and whatever 'modules' you've subscribed to using.

A 3 year subscription is often as much as the hardware.

It's kind of a waste, it'd be nice if there was a OpenWRT style firmware you could load on all the old Fortinet, Watchguard, Sophos, etc firewalls out there.

There is plenty of white box switches and routers you can load things like Vyos or cumulus Linux.