From my experience, the hardware the ISP provides goes wrong far more often than the modem/router I purchased. The combo units my local Comcast affiliate leases out are a mess of problems, and I know multiple people that have gotten fed up with support never fixing the issue and just accept the frequent problems.

I had similar problems until I bought my own modem and router. Even if you have to pay someone to fix the rare breakdowns, I'd still advocate bringing your own router/modem.

TW->Spectrum where I live seems to have a pretty common practice of simply taking the modem from customer 1 complaining about internet dropout/etc and giving it to customer 2 complaining about internet dropouts.

Besides the bad router hardware, in my experience with the cable companies, a large part of the problem has been signal issues going through old cables, splitters, etc. The one advantage to owning your own modem is you can select one that gives you good signal quality metrics and error reporting.

Which brings me to what I view as the fundamental issue here. The cable companies frankly don't give a crap about service quality. They _CAN_ monitor signal strength, dropped packets, signal loss, etc from their end. With that they could act proactively, like "Hey this customer's modem won't lock on 1/2 of our frequencies lets call them and send a tech to fix it".

But they don't, and really that tells me everything I need to know about those companies.

Knowing already where the wire comes into your house from the splitter is a big help too.

On the converse, people I know who aren't patient on the phone, or can't get to their modem when a tech shows up, or are just plain angry complaining about the service don't get anywhere.

When my neighborhood was built out, they apparently used "the wrong cable" and it seems to be at effective EOL. Everybody I know who is nice and somewhat technical has had no problem getting it replaced. The people who get on facebook and talk about how horrible Spectrum is continue to have problems.

The gateway part on these little appliance-boxes is usually pretty solid (with any problems people experience usually being line or head-end problems); it's the router part that has all the shite code. (Remember, at least for cable Internet, all the gateways are sitting on a shared medium. If the gateway logic in the box wasn't solid, it'd be causing the ISP problems, by interfering with other customers. By the anthropic principle, the gateways that survive to be purchased+distributed by ISPs are the ones that don't cause them such problems, and therefore the ones that have robust gateway code.)

Even more fun, is that they regularly refuse to provision a modem at its full capability despite your service tier. AKA you have a modem that does X, and a tier that does X, but they will only provision it for 1/2X (and not bother to tell you that). A few years ago I fought a long protracted battle with their support/escalation/etc over a few months to get my modem qualified at the higher tiers and in the end the best excuse they gave was that it was a business decision.

AKA, making me upgrade my modem for no technical reason played into their ploy for renting me one.

When I set this hardware in bridge mode and try to use my own router with dd-wrt, my speeds drop to below 50 Mbps.

I could never figure out why.

I actually wish ONT are standardised like DSL Modem, so anyone could bring their own ONT / Modem with a username and password. I think Germany allows consumer to choose or bring their own equipment.

But with my Motorola router wifi never goes out.

I had to reboot my ISPs hardware 1-2 times a month.

I bought my own and had to reboot it once in 12 months. The connection is slightly faster as well and much more consistent.

That may be true, but the rental fees are a shameless money-grab. From the OP:

> the average customer is paying between $12-$15 per month to rent equipment like a router and modem.

There's no consumer-friendly justification for that cost, given the hardware is cheap, has a long life, and the only kind of on-site physical service it could get is an eventual replacement. It's just a way of using small-print to sneakily raise prices for most users, without having to include it in the full, advertised monthly fee.

It first appeared on my bill as a "home network" fee 3 months after signing.

Or being stuck with the one with the absolute shit WiFi that constantly crashes if you have more than 25 connections running at once or more than 5 devices because the manufacturer wanted to save $0.05 and undersized the working memory on the box and sourced the knockoff WiFi chipset with buggy drivers.

No it's not. I lease one not because I can't figure it out but because I have better things to do than fiddle with my Internet connection and it's cheap. Yes its a ripoff, but not a bad one when I calculate my typical time value vs what I am paying. The hardware they lease (Cox in SoCal) is not too bad. It works, isn't a symmetric NAT (why does symmetric exist?), is fast, is dual band, and IPv6 works.

Same reason I use a Mac and not a Linux laptop. Same reason I don't put a more open OS on my phone. Same reason our company pays a little more for a managed Kubernetes instance at Google instead of rolling our own on bare metal. I could go on.

We are in the age of time poverty. Ease of use wins.

I've had issues, called them, they say it's likely a router issue, then when the tech arrives they HAVE NO EXTRA ROUTER, so I had to take a second time off work.

You're screwed either way, but I do feel you overstate the difficulty. Installing my own router was actually the same procedure as when they rented me a router. The "techie" part is if you don't want to install all their crappy spyware, but otherwise, it's plug in, hit a website, and press the power button when prompted, which is exactly what they had me do regardless of who owned the router.

Even as a technical person who could shop for, and configure, and troubleshoot their own router, that's simply not how I want to spend my finite time and energy.

Now I am in NYC and Spectum/TWC works great in my building (orders of magnitudes better than Comcast), I have the free cable modem but I opted out of the $5/month wi-fi and got myself a $55 ASUS AC1900 router (refurbished) and it worked just great!

Anecdotally, I've had several friends take time off of work to let the repairman into their home often to reset or swap out the device. It means that they are forced to be without internet for the duration, and personally I've never had a repairman from a big cable company come within the agreed upon appointment window.

It is honestly faster, and more reliable to go to the nearest electronic store in a larger city and buy new hardware than it is to be cancelled on and wait for repairs that may or may not come.

Nearly every call was from an employee with their own cable modem or WiFi router.

Most of these devices had never been updated, and many were part of botnets. When replaced with ISP gear things just magically start to work.

Surprisingly Comcast, RCN, and even AT&T had ample supply in mid-March. CPE-as-a-service makes sense for non-technology people.

Maybe there is a business opportunity there. Have a service where the customer buys a "rainy day repair card", only limited to configuration / setup.

150USD is about 12,000 Rs. in India, and for that we could get quite a performant router.

one side is that comcast can make your router a public access point for their service.

another side is that recently at&t pushed out a "telemetry package" to my router that classifies all the local traffic and what kinds of applications are running.

I suspect it's even more interesting when you involve the DNS servers their router points to.

Personally, my hangup is that the fix for my AC might be as simple are replacing a fairly cheap component. For me, I try to take some pride in knowing how to fix my possessions and being a little self-sustained.

I do wish I could find an oscilloscope and hot air rework station for cheap though.

I would return it to the local office and get a receipt anyway.

I used to work for Comcast, I have some insight into how modem activation works, and I know the troubles people with their own router go through.

Comcast has gotten a lot better about supporting customer equipment. They maintain a "supported device list" and as long as you buy something off that list they'll help you. Granted if you're buying your own device you should be prepared to do some minimal troubleshooting like using ping and looking at LEDs.

I once came home from a business trip to no internet. When I called Comcast I explained the troubleshooting steps I took and what the modem was reporting. They sent a tech out in 2 days to tone the line. When they couldn't get a good tone they sent a level 2 tech out to replace the line. Turns out someone had put a screw through a cable chase when they were re-siding the building while i was away.

I’ve also never had a problem activating a modem. They ask for the MAC, model number, and sometimes S/N, then it works. The model and S/N are optional and don’t even have to be correct.

They’re a terrible company and I would not deal with them given the choice, but this isn’t one of the reasons why.

In which case you can take your router completely out of the picture by plugging your computer directly in to Comcast's line.