Having worked at an ISP, the problem is that pretty much all the routers/modems at price points consumers will accept (because an expensive router, even if leas

Having worked at an ISP, the problem is that pretty much all the routers/modems at price points consumers will accept (because an expensive router, even if leased, means a higher monthly bill) suck. 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.