What is the average lifespan of an Airport Express Base Station?

Hi Guys.
I have just lost a second base station.  This seems to happen after a couple of years. 
In the first case, the base station was visible and linked in  apparently normally to my wifi network.   However I could not get my printer to print.  I reset it normally and again everything appeared normal, but it did not work.  I bought a new one and everything works fine with the new Airport Express so clearly the old one had stopped working.
In the latest case.  The base station light was green so appearing properly linked in, but again no signal was received (by my music centre) and it was "out of range" using  Airport Utility.  On resetting it, the link up bit of the Airport Utility reports an unexpected error at the end and though the light on the base station turns green implying that it is linked to the network, it is invisible.
Both base stations were about 3 years old.  Is this typical of their life span or have I been unlucky?

Yes it is interesting to look at the speed of technological advance.  I first started using an Apple about 30 years ago when they had floppy discs rather than hard drives.  Mine had two floppy disc drives so I could work all day without swopping discs (single disc drives needed you to swop the data disc and the programme disc every so often as the Ram on the machine was limited.  Since then I have up-graded every 4 to 5 years (approximately every other operating system upgrade)
Before that, in the 1970's we were changing from slide rules to electronic calculators which got steadily better and cheaper.  The early Anita Calculator (with valves) cost as much as a small car - now they give simple calculators away with Christmas Cards.
I wonder how much further the technology behind the home computer will go before further advances, like those in calculators, become pointless from the user's point of view.  Maybe it will take another 10 years or so but once everything we want to do is incorporated into a voice driven computing device possibly storing data in the cloud, then it will be the reliability of the components that will be the benchmark of a good system and having the latest "fastest" model will be far less important.

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