> Don't the same companies make enterprise routers and consumer routers? Kinda but not really (the consumer routers are usually made by subsidiaries, e.g. link

> Don't the same companies make enterprise routers and consumer routers? Kinda but not really (the consumer routers are usually made by subsidiaries, e.g. linksys -> Cisco) > Don't they presumably employ the same engineers to write software across them? For the most part no, but much more importantly the margins are much worse on consumer gear. Race-to-the-bottom pricing means race-to-the-bottom quality and race-to-the-bottom patch cycles (the last one is probably the most important). Add in that there is a deliberate effort to not make low-margin consumer gear not cannibalize high-margin business/enterprise gear. A noted exception to this is NetGate, whose pfSense hardware runs the same OS with the same engineering up and down the stack. Probably not the best idea for a normal consumer to buy, though.