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Comment by ggggggggggw | Hacker News Reader

> And these days so many people get it through their cable provider (or DSL, whatever) who have a marked interest in not generating support calls means you may get decent equipment.

You would think that, unfortunately it isn't true. Usually those ISP provided combination routers are completely outsourced - as in their hardware and firmware are both made by a chinese OEM overseas.

Believe me when I say there is nothing worse than the firmware on those chinese routers. They'll grab a bunch of open source software, reskin it, plug the chipset's reference driver into the OSS, then do a basic sanity test and ship it. You get what you pay for, and the ISPs want to pay as little as humanly possible.

I don't know what they do about the support. I remember one time we brought in an ISP's combination modem/router for performance tests against our device lineup, and it would crash if you ever tried to pull more than 40mbit/s through its ethernet ports.

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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.

Fully agree with the comment about the quality of Chinese firmware. I spent the best part of a decade working for a UK company producing reference designs for mobile chipsets, which we sold to many Asian clients, and I lost count of the times I had to travel to the Far East to sort out the mess they'd made of the software.

Their philosophy seemed to be to throw as many inexperienced graduates at the problem as they could afford and eventually it would somehow work - as though an infinite number of engineers would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare!

I've never understood Shakespeare to have much renown as a software engineer, though I suppose I've never understood him to be a particularly poor one either.

You appear blissfully unaware of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

I'm aware of the theorem, but I was being willfully ignorant to achieve a primary goal of making a joke. The secondary goal was to point out that the engineers the Chinese are hiring are probably better at programming than Shakespeare was. Regardless, the tone of my comment was in line with that of the comment I was responding to -- surely anybody hiring engineers would not judge the venture a success if they found the engineers had reproduced a number of plays from a particular Victorian playwright.

Elizabethan not Victorian.

Whoops, good call.

I switched cable internet providers because the original one (a large incumbent here in Toronto that rhymes with Ogers) wanted to force me onto their combo wifi/modem (the other large incumbent, rhyming with 'Ell, has the same constraint). I absolutely refuse to use an integrated device from the carrier at this point because I have experienced the crap that they use previously. Give me a piece of equipment that does one thing well, and let me pick the most reliable in-house networking equipment myself.

Standard procedure here is to ignore the device's onboard wifi and plug in your own access point. Don't tell them, or they may whine about it being unsupported.

You don't have to use the integrated access point just because it's there.

Sure, but you still wind up dealing with the craptastic device. The router I currently use which is forced upon me by my ISP will hang for a few seconds if it encounters a DLNA packet. That means several seconds of packet loss and some TCP connection being closed.

I have wasted so many hours on the phone with their support without getting anywhere. They wouldnt even acknowledge there is a problem until I showed them graphs. Then they sent an "engineer" over who also knew fuck all and accomplished nothing. He then seemed to have reported back there was nothing wrong and now they ignore me.

I should switch ISPs but the performance of the network compared to the price is excellent. Just this shitbox of a router.

How do they force the router on you? Is there really no possibility of using an alternative?

At least in Germany we had the so called "Routerzwang". Some ISPs allowed third party equipment, but many didn't. You'd get a modem / router / AP combo device and the ISP had complete control over the firmware. Since there was no competition, most ISPs didn't care about the quality of their software or even security updates.

Primarily because our phoneline also comes from the same ISP which has to use their shitbox. They don't give you the credentials for that, you get a pretty configured router. It's possible to root the box, steal all necessary credentials and clone the mac but that is a huge hassle and obviously not supported.

I had similar issues, and I complained enough that my ISP gave me a second, just plain stupid modem and a splitter, so now I have their fancy phone/modem/router/wifi one just for the phone, and a simple modem only box for my actual internet. Works like a charm now!

Interesting. I am moving soon so I have given up the fight for now, but I might have to aim for that after the move. Thanks for the tip.

Just keep in mind, their "first tier" of customer support probably can't authorize that kind of thing, and probably won't even know what the heck you are wanting. I complained about the crappy slow internet and bad ping until I got to their actual tech guys, and told him the older modem did better, and he was like "Well, why don't you use one of them?", I said "Need the phone", and he told me to just put a splitter on it and use both, he'd set it all up and have the local office put one aside for me. I only even pay rent on the one modem, so it's actually an amazingly good setup, other then meaning I've got the start of my own "commercial grade" networking setup attached to a wall in the basement, with the modems, the router, a switch, and a server.

Thankfully in the UK all the (cheap) ADSL suppliers I've used have provided a modem+router+AP in which you can just read the access credentials off the config screen. No need to spoof MAC or anything when setting up a new 'router' just use the right credentials.

Now I'm wondering why, whether it's legislation or the way our ISPs relate to the infrastructure.

In the netherlands providers has linked the wifi enable settings in their modem/router/accesspoints to their online account and if you disable the wifi you won't get access to the free networks they deployed everywhere.

This is mainly because those networks are deployed by adding an second SSID to the router with WPA enterprise auth. The solution many people choose is putting the router in the basement with a lot of aluminium foil around it.

You can also put a heavy resistor inline of the antenna.

If you can do that, you could just unplug the antenna.

But they want the router back if you switch provider. If you void the warrenty then I have to pay for it.

I don't see why this is a problem. You want to free load on other people's connections but not share your own? (In the US anyway, the free wifi you get for running that secondary SSID just comes from other people's personal connections).

This is why we can't have nice things. I hope they find a way to defeat people doing this, but my guess is it would be prohibitively expensive (war driving entire cities, etc).

The problem is that I don't have the bandwidth for it. If a single user connects to the free accesspoint and starts skype r a youtube video then I cannot use the internet anymore.

I had this problem with my Optimum router. I actually got better performance by throwing it in the closet and using a $30 dollar piece of crap instead (which has since been replaced). Sadly, it seems that everything in the consumer networking market is a trap.

Wrap the router in foil?

That's unfortunate. I never really use the Wi-Fi on my Comcast box so I don't know if it was any good. I've had great experiences with people Google fiber boxes, but that's Google and isn't exactly a mass deployment so…

> You get what you pay for, and the ISPs want to pay as little as humanly possible.

More a case of you get what they (the ISP) pays for (or doesn't pay for).

Yes I believe such cheap routers are just copies of the reference designs that the leading manufacturers publish.

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