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>The average consumer may honestly be better off getting a cable tech to come out and fix their broken router than buying their own and trying to figure it each time something goes wrong (which is arguably rare, but very problematic when you have no clue).

From my experience, the hardware the ISP provides goes wrong far more often than the modem/router I purchased. The combo units my local Comcast affiliate leases out are a mess of problems, and I know multiple people that have gotten fed up with support never fixing the issue and just accept the frequent problems.

I had similar problems until I bought my own modem and router. Even if you have to pay someone to fix the rare breakdowns, I'd still advocate bringing your own router/modem.

I find that if you tell the tech who's setting up your combo gateway-router that you're planning on using it with your own router, and so request that they set their gateway up in bridge mode (deactivating not only the routing, but also its wireless AP) then a lot of the flakiness goes away.

The gateway part on these little appliance-boxes is usually pretty solid (with any problems people experience usually being line or head-end problems); it's the router part that has all the shite code. (Remember, at least for cable Internet, all the gateways are sitting on a shared medium. If the gateway logic in the box wasn't solid, it'd be causing the ISP problems, by interfering with other customers. By the anthropic principle, the gateways that survive to be purchased+distributed by ISPs are the ones that don't cause them such problems, and therefore the ones that have robust gateway code.)

I have a Comcast router modem combo(group contract through HOA, so free for me). My advertised is 125 Mbps and I do hit close to 125 when I use many of those speed test websites.

When I set this hardware in bridge mode and try to use my own router with dd-wrt, my speeds drop to below 50 Mbps.

I could never figure out why.

What speed did you get in bridge mode with a single PC directly connected to the modem? Perhaps your router was hitting some hardware performance limit when doing NAT and everything at full speed.

No different. The speed even with ethernet never go above 50-55 mbps.

If you are already setting up your own router, it seems like a huge waste to rent just the modem from them. Setting up your own cable modem requires little more than plugging it in, and your ISP should offer support if it's one of their approved modems.

With the current regulation regime, bringing your own modem on spectrum has meant that you give up the ability to get the highest performing tiers. This despite the fact that the modems on the open market were actually better/more capable than the spectrum only modem (aka not available publicly) they were giving people for the gigabit access. (this BTW just recently changed).

Even more fun, is that they regularly refuse to provision a modem at its full capability despite your service tier. AKA you have a modem that does X, and a tier that does X, but they will only provision it for 1/2X (and not bother to tell you that). A few years ago I fought a long protracted battle with their support/escalation/etc over a few months to get my modem qualified at the higher tiers and in the end the best excuse they gave was that it was a business decision.

AKA, making me upgrade my modem for no technical reason played into their ploy for renting me one.

What company was this? Couldn't you just fake your vendor to them somehow by spoofing your mac address?

>The combo units my local Comcast affiliate leases out are a mess of problems, and I know multiple people that have gotten fed up with support never fixing the issue and just accept the frequent problems.

TW->Spectrum where I live seems to have a pretty common practice of simply taking the modem from customer 1 complaining about internet dropout/etc and giving it to customer 2 complaining about internet dropouts.

Besides the bad router hardware, in my experience with the cable companies, a large part of the problem has been signal issues going through old cables, splitters, etc. The one advantage to owning your own modem is you can select one that gives you good signal quality metrics and error reporting.

Which brings me to what I view as the fundamental issue here. The cable companies frankly don't give a crap about service quality. They _CAN_ monitor signal strength, dropped packets, signal loss, etc from their end. With that they could act proactively, like "Hey this customer's modem won't lock on 1/2 of our frequencies lets call them and send a tech to fix it".

But they don't, and really that tells me everything I need to know about those companies.

You can just call them and ask to check signal strength etc on their end.

Frankly I have better things to do with my time.

And every time you call them you have to spend half an hour of your limited time on this planet convincing them that yes, you did already try turning it off and on again...

You can, as can most readers here. I've always had fantastic luck with it. If you are kind and sound competent on the phone, they are much more inclined to roll a truck to look at the issue. If you're likewise kind and prepared when the tech shows up, they are much more inclined to actually address the issue for real rather than pretending.

Knowing already where the wire comes into your house from the splitter is a big help too.

On the converse, people I know who aren't patient on the phone, or can't get to their modem when a tech shows up, or are just plain angry complaining about the service don't get anywhere.

When my neighborhood was built out, they apparently used "the wrong cable" and it seems to be at effective EOL. Everybody I know who is nice and somewhat technical has had no problem getting it replaced. The people who get on facebook and talk about how horrible Spectrum is continue to have problems.

Your internet doesn't work? Bummer, darn...

That is the thing, long time ago I thought this would be a good trend because it give incentive for ISP to improve the Router Modem Combo, so they would have less support call to deal with ( and better customer experience ). Turns out they dont want any of that, they just want to charge you for convenience.

I actually wish ONT are standardised like DSL Modem, so anyone could bring their own ONT / Modem with a username and password. I think Germany allows consumer to choose or bring their own equipment.

I wouldn't trust my ISP with my router, but i bought my own cable modem off their approved list to avoid rental fees. However, if you look more deeply into that, it's an approved modem because the ISP does have access to full management of that hw down to fw upgrades - and to give some credit, the modem portion does seem to work seamlessly.

Ditto. Mediacom router, wifi goes out every other day (and this is common). Suddenly you are using pricey phone data instead of cheap Mediacom data. No warning till you look at the usage meter.

But with my Motorola router wifi never goes out.

I second this.

I had to reboot my ISPs hardware 1-2 times a month.

I bought my own and had to reboot it once in 12 months. The connection is slightly faster as well and much more consistent.

> The average consumer may honestly be better off getting a cable tech to come out and fix their broken router than buying their own and trying to figure it each time something goes wrong (which is arguably rare, but very problematic when you have no clue).

That may be true, but the rental fees are a shameless money-grab. From the OP:

> the average customer is paying between $12-$15 per month to rent equipment like a router and modem.

There's no consumer-friendly justification for that cost, given the hardware is cheap, has a long life, and the only kind of on-site physical service it could get is an eventual replacement. It's just a way of using small-print to sneakily raise prices for most users, without having to include it in the full, advertised monthly fee.

And on top of what you said, the rental fee has been increasing since they started the rental service. Comcast intially charged what, $4/month or something?

In addition to the equipment rental, Mediacom charges an extra fee if you want the wifi turned on. The radios are there, just turned off if you don't pay.

It first appeared on my bill as a "home network" fee 3 months after signing.

For me calling into their help desk, sitting on hold for fifteen minutes, having to go through all of the remedial "turn it off and on again" steps I've already tried for half an hour before finally getting someone to replace the stupid thing is way worse than just fixing it myself or running out to the store and picking up a new one.

Or being stuck with the one with the absolute shit WiFi that constantly crashes if you have more than 25 connections running at once or more than 5 devices because the manufacturer wanted to save $0.05 and undersized the working memory on the box and sourced the knockoff WiFi chipset with buggy drivers.

> Obviously, for the genius technical minds that browse this site, leasing a router that is just pulling basic NAT/DNS/firewall duty is a cardinal sin.

No it's not. I lease one not because I can't figure it out but because I have better things to do than fiddle with my Internet connection and it's cheap. Yes its a ripoff, but not a bad one when I calculate my typical time value vs what I am paying. The hardware they lease (Cox in SoCal) is not too bad. It works, isn't a symmetric NAT (why does symmetric exist?), is fast, is dual band, and IPv6 works.

Same reason I use a Mac and not a Linux laptop. Same reason I don't put a more open OS on my phone. Same reason our company pays a little more for a managed Kubernetes instance at Google instead of rolling our own on bare metal. I could go on.

We are in the age of time poverty. Ease of use wins.

I own my own modem. I tell my mom to rent Comcast’s router and modem. It’s like you said, it’s just not worth having to support it when things go wrong. Comcast is so fast to just say come in and get a new one if anything is odd, it rules out a hundred dollar piece of equipment being the problem quickly.

I don't think I've ever had a problem with my router in my 20+ years of internet usage that wasn't fixed by 90% of the time restarting it by pulling the plug or 10% calling the ISP to let them know shit's not working.

Having worked a bit in tech support and heard some horror stories from others; it seems like the average consumer doesn't know how to restart a router, nor would they like to do it themselves.

My mom called me when Time Warner started charging modem rent. I looked up the supported modem list, and got one. Its connected to the same router that I have (both running OpenWRT). Neither router nor modem have ever caused any problems in the 5+ years since. They power cycle when the electric goes out for a moment every year or so.

I've bought my own router and had Comcast later claim it was theirs (because they collected the SN off it, and put it in their system, then later, lo and behold, the SN is in their system).

I've had issues, called them, they say it's likely a router issue, then when the tech arrives they HAVE NO EXTRA ROUTER, so I had to take a second time off work.

You're screwed either way, but I do feel you overstate the difficulty. Installing my own router was actually the same procedure as when they rented me a router. The "techie" part is if you don't want to install all their crappy spyware, but otherwise, it's plug in, hit a website, and press the power button when prompted, which is exactly what they had me do regardless of who owned the router.

> I simply value my time more than the $150 annual savings an arbitrary consumer may realize

Even as a technical person who could shop for, and configure, and troubleshoot their own router, that's simply not how I want to spend my finite time and energy.

Found the cable shill... there’s literally no reason why I should still be paying $5.99 a month for a modem that was built in 2010 and hasn’t received a single update since 2014. Except for the fact fuck me, because they can.

Depends where you are, more specifically the condition of the lines. I used to live in Boston's suburbia and had Comcast/Xfinity as the only provider. Lines were old and very far away from their CO, so .. many issues. I opted for renting they $5 then $7 then $10 then $12/month cable modem so when I call for tech support they would not blame the problem on CPE.

Now I am in NYC and Spectum/TWC works great in my building (orders of magnitudes better than Comcast), I have the free cable modem but I opted out of the $5/month wi-fi and got myself a $55 ASUS AC1900 router (refurbished) and it worked just great!

The biggest problem with this argument is that if you live in a larger city, often times their time still equates to my time.

Anecdotally, I've had several friends take time off of work to let the repairman into their home often to reset or swap out the device. It means that they are forced to be without internet for the duration, and personally I've never had a repairman from a big cable company come within the agreed upon appointment window.

It is honestly faster, and more reliable to go to the nearest electronic store in a larger city and buy new hardware than it is to be cancelled on and wait for repairs that may or may not come.

Agree. At $dayjob, our help desk guys reported dozens of calls from people having VPN connectivity or performance issues since stary-home. But most users see great throughout.

Nearly every call was from an employee with their own cable modem or WiFi router.

Most of these devices had never been updated, and many were part of botnets. When replaced with ISP gear things just magically start to work.

Surprisingly Comcast, RCN, and even AT&T had ample supply in mid-March. CPE-as-a-service makes sense for non-technology people.

I would agree if the quality of the leased router was at all up to scratch. I rented one from Comcast once and had endless latency issues, weird connection drops, bad wifi connections, etc. When I moved to another address (still on Comcast) I bought a cheap modem and a linksys router and haven't had any issues since. I get the point you're making -- gotta consider the maintenance burden -- but in my experience that still puts the rented modem/router at a disadvantage. And I'm no networking expert, no genius mind at work, I promise.

> The average consumer may honestly be better off getting a cable tech to come out and fix their broken router than buying their own and trying to figure it each time something goes wrong (which is arguably rare, but very problematic when you have no clue).

Maybe there is a business opportunity there. Have a service where the customer buys a "rainy day repair card", only limited to configuration / setup.

150USD is about 12,000 Rs. in India, and for that we could get quite a performant router.

The other point is that when they own the hardware they can do what they want with it.

one side is that comcast can make your router a public access point for their service.

another side is that recently at&t pushed out a "telemetry package" to my router that classifies all the local traffic and what kinds of applications are running.

I suspect it's even more interesting when you involve the DNS servers their router points to.

I think the "peace of mind" is analogous to appliance insurance, i.e. HVAC. When it stops working have a guy come out and I don't have to worry about it.

Personally, my hangup is that the fix for my AC might be as simple are replacing a fairly cheap component. For me, I try to take some pride in knowing how to fix my possessions and being a little self-sustained.

I pride myself on learning to fix nearly everything I can. Saves me money, and I learn. But that's partly because I have the interest in learning these things.

I do wish I could find an oscilloscope and hot air rework station for cheap though.

Define cheap? (and your requirements) Both of those could be had for ~100 USD.

When I called my ISP to switch over to my own modem they stop charging me the extra $10 a month to rent the modem but said just to keep it. It’s nothing more than a money grab.

Did you get that is writing? Because ISPs have been know to say that, and then turn around and keep charging you.

Or tell you to return it when you move/cancel in 10 years. At which point they have you over a barrel for the $$$$ they want for a piece of equipment that is basically worthless.

I would return it to the local office and get a receipt anyway.

Every try to bring your own modem/router while using Comcast? Good luck. No matter what the issue is, customer support will be adamant that it's your router.

I used to work for Comcast, I have some insight into how modem activation works, and I know the troubles people with their own router go through.

Exactly this. I used to bring my own, but I'm done. Every year when summer rolled around I would have very unreliable internet. Since I had my own modem it was very hard to convince Comcast to replace the cable to the house. Finally gave up and asked them for a rental modem. When issues persisted, they came and fixed it for real.

I don't usually use a modem-router combo because they inevitably crap out in weird ways. What I usually do is buy a cable modem, then wire it into a pfSense firewall, and pull one or more wireless access points off of that. It's easy to troubleshoot and I never have problems with it. The setup I have now covers a quarter acre with a single access point.

Comcast has gotten a lot better about supporting customer equipment. They maintain a "supported device list" and as long as you buy something off that list they'll help you. Granted if you're buying your own device you should be prepared to do some minimal troubleshooting like using ping and looking at LEDs.

I once came home from a business trip to no internet. When I called Comcast I explained the troubleshooting steps I took and what the modem was reporting. They sent a tech out in 2 days to tone the line. When they couldn't get a good tone they sent a level 2 tech out to replace the line. Turns out someone had put a screw through a cable chase when they were re-siding the building while i was away.

This was my experience bringing my own Linksys separate modem and router. A couple of months ago my Internet randomly went out. The issue was something with the line. I just had to tell the lady on the phone which lights were blinking. A tech came and fixed it.

"No matter what the issue is, customer support will be adamant that it's your router."

In which case you can take your router completely out of the picture by plugging your computer directly in to Comcast's line.

Not unless you use their modem.

Years ago I was required to buy a Surfboard Motorola modem through one of the companies my apartment complex had an agreement with. I then moved and used it for a few years on Spectrum. Never had issues.

Very true. I spent 2 hours on the phone with Comcast once because I was using a DOCIS compliant, but non-Motorola Surfboard, modem. Something about the S/N didn't fit their forms, and it took me 2 levels of tech support before they could get it authorized and provisioned.

This is not correct at all. It’s Comcast’s policy to support any modem on the supported modem list. From first hand experience with half a dozen non-comcast modems, and way too many support calls and site visits to count, never once have they even suggested that I should use their modem, and they have never refused support or otherwise shown any resistance.

I’ve also never had a problem activating a modem. They ask for the MAC, model number, and sometimes S/N, then it works. The model and S/N are optional and don’t even have to be correct.

They’re a terrible company and I would not deal with them given the choice, but this isn’t one of the reasons why.