As for Ubiquiti being consumer grade, it is like an Intel Xeon E3. It is the same chip that is used in consumer stuff with enhancements for reliability. For instance, Ubiquiti equipment supports grounding via STP Ethernet. It generally supports some variant of PoE and is meant to be mounted on walls and ceilings. There are even outdoor models. It also does not require a reboot on every change. In addition, there is a team of engineers working on making the firmware better and their customers are able to report problems to them. Then there are firmware features like VLANs, policy based routing, BGP, ping watch dogs and other things not found in stock firmware of consumer grade equipment.
Comcast does this as well - if you are leasing the Comcast modem then you are putting out a pair of APs. One of them is a public Comcast hotspot. I think you can request that it be turned off however.
Right now I have a Cisco DPC3008, which I can't really complain about. I have a Buffalo Airstation Extreme 1900, which has been good so far apart from its minute-long reboot times. I thought I was getting a DD-WRT router though, didn't realize the standard version did not have a supported DD-WRT build.
I have to admit though - when a contractor ripped out the sidewalks and took out my cable, I was glad that my neighbors were running the hotspot. Took almost 3 weeks to get back online.
In Germany, Kabel Deutschland can and does regularly update your cable modem remotely. There's a even a list of "censored websites" pushed down to your own router. They provide a Fritzbox but it's slightly more locked down (feature-wise) than normal so you can't even use it to a full potential.
I bought an Airport and stuck it behind it to at least isolate our home network from this backdoored mess. Good to know that Ubiquity provide a reasonable replacement.
Bought my own modem + router and saw my speeds go from ~40mbs to 120+mbs. Upload speed also saw a similar scale increase.
If you don't trust your ISP provided firewall/router then you probably have bigger problems. Both big ISPs in my area offer to turn the router into a bridge-mode device I can plug into a box running pfsense if I desire it, but frankly, that sounds like a PITA. Their routers work well enough. I think going forward we will just buy access point, not routers. The router problem has been solved for a long time.
>Abandon all consumer grade gear. Just get Ubiquity stuff.
I'd argue Ubiquity is really consumer stuff, just small business friendly. Their performance, price, stability, etc isn't that much better than a Netgear in access point mode. They just have a java-based controller which is handy for managing multiple AP's. Inside, they're kinda crappy.
>Google just released their routers (like last week), which support automatic mesh networking when you use multiple.
Google wifi is actually a latecomer. You can get residential friendlier Ubiquity-style solutions via Orbi or Eero, which is what Google is copying here. I believe Google's 3-pack beats both on price currently.
edit: modems and routers are completely different cases/devices and performance/stability are different than money saving. Regardless, my ISP doesn't charge me for my modem, so there's no incentive for me to buy my own.