[186654] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Broadband Router Comparisons
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mikael Abrahamsson)
Sun Dec 27 02:37:35 2015
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2015 08:37:25 +0100 (CET)
From: Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>
To: Mike <mike-nanog@tiedyenetworks.com>
In-Reply-To: <567F7BF7.9070106@tiedyenetworks.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
On Sat, 26 Dec 2015, Mike wrote:
> As a service provider with largely residential/small business customers, I
> certainly have some thoughts on broadband routers. Sorry if this is overly
> long.
>
> Firstly, they are all junk.
Yes, that's correct. We get what we pay for. If the ISP buys the CPE,
their procurement department will get bonus for shaving off every cent off
of the price possible, meaning the device manufacturer also pressures all
their people to come up a way to checkbox all the features requested.
For the low price CPEs bought in the electronics store, mostly by people
with no technical expertise, we have a similar situation. Shiny box, list
of some checkbox features, sell it for 8-12 months until there is a new
SOC which is slightly more cost reduced, release a new hardware revision
(completely incompatible with the old one but from a black box of view
does the same), start selling that rev instead.
Margins in this business are super tight and most of the vendors aren't
making any money, just like the mobile phone business. Providing security
updates is just a cost, there is no upside, because these boxes sit in a
closet, unloved until they stop working, and they're thrown out and
replaced by a new unloved box that goes into the closet until it stops
working again.
So the ecosystem is completely broken, and I have no idea how to fix it.
If someone like Consumer Reports or similar agency started testing and
rating devices on these things like long-time support, automatic updates,
software quality etc, and not just testing wifi speed as a factor of
distance, we might get somewhere.
--
Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
