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After I had fiber installed at my grandmother's apartment in Shanghai, I found a backdoor in router that China Telecom provided. It was similar with Verizon in
by ryao 10y ago
After I had fiber installed at my grandmother's apartment in Shanghai, I found a backdoor in router that China Telecom provided. It was similar with Verizon in the US where they have your wifi password and remote access for various things. Then there was Cablevision that turned every router that they provided to people in my area into an access point without permission. Beyond having creepy backdoors, ISP provided routers are junk. There is no good reason to use them.
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.
- paulmd 10y ago> Then there was Cablevision that turned every router that they provided to people in my area into an access point without permission. 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.
- ryao 10y agoIt is probably better in the long term to just buy your own modem, router, switch and AP. ISP provided equipment is always subpar in comparison to what you can buy from Newegg and all in one units are bad in general.
- paulmd 10y agoAbsolutely - I think Comcast charges like $10-15 per month for the privilege of polluting my airwaves with their access point. You can pick up one of their "approved" modems off eBay for like $50, so it pays off in a handful of months. You tell them some hardware ID number, either a MAC address or same idea, and they can auto-provision it for you. Takes literally 5 minutes and you're online. 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.
- retromario 10y agoThis. 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.
- jlgaddis 10y agoFWIW, your cable modem downloads a configuration file from the ISP every time it boots up. That's just how DOCSIS works.