You would think that, unfortunately it isn't true. Usually those ISP provided combination routers are completely outsourced - as in their hardware and firmware are both made by a chinese OEM overseas.

Believe me when I say there is nothing worse than the firmware on those chinese routers. They'll grab a bunch of open source software, reskin it, plug the chipset's reference driver into the OSS, then do a basic sanity test and ship it. You get what you pay for, and the ISPs want to pay as little as humanly possible.

I don't know what they do about the support. I remember one time we brought in an ISP's combination modem/router for performance tests against our device lineup, and it would crash if you ever tried to pull more than 40mbit/s through its ethernet ports.

They all work really well in the testing lab, where there's 50m of cat5 between the DSL modem and the DSLAM on the floor below. But then you find out once it's deployed that they have big issues with certain kinds of interference, so for a small segment of your userbase they have more dropouts than other routers. Since the company has already bought tens of thousands of them at this time, it's not really practical to just recall all of them and buy new ones. So the ISP files a bug with the upstream vendor. After some months of pushing, the vendor gives the ISP a special firmware build that's supposed to fix the problem. The fix never gets into the official firmware line (presumably because it has other downsides that the mfg doesn't want to talk about, maybe it's more conservative in line measurements etc), so now the ISP is locked into running this custom firmware version. Oh and that one probably has its own bugs that the older one didn't.

I saw this happen so many times, with routers from multiple vendors over my years doing this kind of thing. I don't run consumer networking equipment in my home anymore.

Their philosophy seemed to be to throw as many inexperienced graduates at the problem as they could afford and eventually it would somehow work - as though an infinite number of engineers would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare!

You don't have to use the integrated access point just because it's there.

I have wasted so many hours on the phone with their support without getting anywhere. They wouldnt even acknowledge there is a problem until I showed them graphs. Then they sent an "engineer" over who also knew fuck all and accomplished nothing. He then seemed to have reported back there was nothing wrong and now they ignore me.

I should switch ISPs but the performance of the network compared to the price is excellent. Just this shitbox of a router.

Now I'm wondering why, whether it's legislation or the way our ISPs relate to the infrastructure.

This is mainly because those networks are deployed by adding an second SSID to the router with WPA enterprise auth. The solution many people choose is putting the router in the basement with a lot of aluminium foil around it.

This is why we can't have nice things. I hope they find a way to defeat people doing this, but my guess is it would be prohibitively expensive (war driving entire cities, etc).

More a case of you get what they (the ISP) pays for (or doesn't pay for).

So you're going to have to start putting your networking gear away in closets, behind doors, like the rest of us ;)