Consumer grade has taken a nosedive but it’s head and shoulders over what the ISPs give out now.
I had to install a new gateway for my mom the other day, the one supplied by Spectrum. I haven’t looked at or touched one of these things in years, I had no idea what they were like now.
I opened the box, set it up, plugged it in, saw that the only information the display gives customers now are the words “Power” and “Online”, unplugged it, put it back in the box, and told Mom “I love you too much to let this in your home. I’ll buy you a modem.”
I didn’t even get to the part where apparently you have to use an app to change the password, and the admin panel is not truly accessible anymore.
I found out that ISP provided crap can do one thing OK. I have an ISP provided cable modem / router / wifi doing only the cable modem part and bridging the connection to a MikroTik router. Then I have another ISP provided router / wifi only doing the wifi part, again bridged to the MikroTik.
Both the ISP provided boxes were crashing pretty consistently when they were doing routing, firewall, wifi etc. (torrenting with a VPN while watching a 4K stream over wifi would just melt the box) but when they’re only doing one thing they’ve been working fine.
The only eyesore in ly setup is my ISPs router, which is only used as a fiber modem at this point. I tried to probe my ISPs customer service for any info regarding the protocol in use, but I got nowhere with them. One of these days I might fire up wireshark to see how it’s connecting so I can replace it with my own, but that’d involve downtime.
My small ISP (in Germany) gives out AVM Fritzbox, and they may not be as good as ubiquity, but they are certainly not crap. The routers of the bigger ISPs have even gotten pretty good as well over here and no one is ever forced to use the ISP supplied box in Germany anyway.
I just use the Fritzbox as a router and disabled the WiFi, which I do with Ubiquity APs. In one or two years I may have had to restart it once or twice, that is good enough for me.