> I feel like family will either be technical enough to understand OPNSense, or not technical at all at which point even Unifi is not something they'll manage themselves.

Agreed. Major ISPs in the US (and I presume many other places) offer routers that work well enough to satisfy the requirements of any non-technical household and often come with provisioning/troubleshooting features that enable the ISP to provide technical support if necessary.

In the old days, ISP-provided devices often lagged behind other consumer or prosumer network offerings, and it made sense to swap them out... but that's not really the case today. Today, swapping out the ISPs router is probably going to make a non-technical user's life harder, unless they have someone technical to manage it for them.

ISP gear is still trash. It's just better for the user, because the ISP won't bitch and moan and tell you your hardware is unsupported.

"Trash" is subjective.

Satisfaction happens when a product or service meets the user's requirements. A new Cisco catalyst setup may be technologically superior to my mother's ISP provided router, but it might not make it easier for her to play Candy Crush on her iPhone if she forgets the wifi password.

I suppose you're right. Just after seeing my family lose internet a bunch of times due to the ISP supplied router just straight up failing, I don't have much confidence in the hardware. Also I don't think that rebooting the router once a week because it's frozen makes it a quality product that brings satisfaction. I've never seen an ISP supplied router that isn't like this. But that could just be my personal experience.

I mean, when the first thing you hear when you call your ISP, is to "reboot your router" on a recorded message, doesn't that throw a red flag to anybody else? I don't use high end gear at home like Cisco, either, but it has never needed a reboot.

My family uses some of the later devices from Comcast and Verizon and they don't seem to have any issues requiring reboots. I do know, at least for Verizon, that their troubleshooting tool can automatically reboot and reprovision their routers, so there's no need to tell the user to do this on the phone anymore.

No, AT&T is still shipping with a router that cannot hit more than 50% bandwidth on any of 3 devices from under 5 feet. With one wood + pressboard wall between me and the router, 25%.

This is symmetric gigabit product, but still.

You've described a technical problem, not a non-technical problem.

I'm not familiar with that device, but a non-technical user might not care about that "problem", as long as their device does the task they are intending to perform.

The problem is being described technically, which is more useful than the non-technical description of the problem, which is "I don't know, the Zoom isn't working, and the kids can't watch their Netflix at the same time".

Yes, but Zoom and Netflix will work great on 50% or 25% of 1gbps. Heck, they'll work great with 5% of 1gbps.

I am sure that AT&T's CPE equipment is lackluster, but that doesn't mean it won't work to do basic tasks to the satisfaction of a home user.

I dunno what to say, but it does not do basic tasks to the satisfaction of people who buy 1gb internet connections.

I can tell you from experience that large downloads and uploads cause latency-sensitive applications to stutter in a way that is fixed by using ubiquiti gear.

In your defense, you did say non-technical household, but I dunno -- I don't think that wanting to use, eg, backblaze for backup and not have that tank zoom makes you a technical household.

And I don't know anything about the equipment AT&T is handing out these days, it could be particularly bad. But generally speaking the equipment that ISPs are handing out these days is pretty functional for generic use.

I think UnifiOS is pretty straight forward (at least for my generation). I don’t think I would recommend it to my parents but I did to a sibiling and they managed to setup their own system with only a little bit of help from me. I also sent them the awesome lazy admin VLAN guide which helped a ton.