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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

When routers are ordered in bulk from ISPs in certain countries, the ISP is the customer, not the end user. The ISP often doesn’t want the end user to be able to do things like enable IPv6 and things that could boost the effectiveness of Bittorrent. A closed-source design ensures that only the ISP can change certain settings.

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I suspect it's more that when someone flashes a router with custom firmware, they are far more likely to then spend hours on the phone with tech support because they have messed up the MTU settings or can't get VoIP to work because the the SIP ALG isn't working properly anymore...

For every person that delves into the internals who knows what they're doing, there are 10 people who delve into the internals following some incomplete and outdated online heresay...

This is the real reason. 90+% of their customers are, for lack of a better word, idiots when it comes to “hacking”. The ISP just doesn’t want to deal with it. And for the 10-% who do know what they’d be doing, the ISP doesn’t care because it’s another configuration they have to support.

There’s a reason ISPs won’t help you if you hook your own router up. It’s not malicious. Just then doing what makes sense from a financial and a training standpoint.

It’s scummy, but the Dunning-Kruger effect with tech is very real.

I'm fine with that... if they can prove it. They have to release stats that show what percentage of customers called in with a custom firmware and how long it took the techs to solve their issue.

I guaran-fucking-tee you someone smart enough to flash a custom firmware will likely have scoured the Internet for the answer first. Most of the time, they'll find their answer somewhere on a forum / blog post. I would actually be willing to bet money that technical support spends far less time with these people than it does with older customers who "can't be bothered with reading" or younger customers who grew up in the "it just works" generation.

There seems to be a middle ground of people, I think we're called the Analog-To-Digital generation, that had to actually put effort into learning technology, because so much shit had to be manually configured, that we gained a pretty solid understanding of tech and we don't have the fear of it that I see in people even just five years older than me (I'm 40), and the lack of interest in digging around in the "guts" that I see in people far younger than me (25 and under).

> I guaran-fucking-tee you someone smart enough to flash a custom firmware will likely have scoured the Internet for the answer first.

Or they followed a "how to get free movies/tv/sports" guide which told them to follow these simple steps, and something went wrong, and they have no idea what to do next, and they're offline now too.

When I was ~25 in the late 90s (now in my late 40s) I spent 3 months with a 'custom' guy. He was going in and re-writing our software stored procedures. They had to work a particular way or the whole harry ball came flying apart. 2 level one techs, 3 level two techs, 3 on site rebuilds with 3 installers and 4 senior engineers. 3 months of work. All because 1 dude decided to change things out and did not follow our extensive docs and use the people we dedicated to help him. All because he wanted a feature but did not want to pay for it but did not want to admit he broke the multi million dollar system they bought. It was like an hour of work for me and 1 line of code. But he jerked us around for months and cost us thousands of dollars of time and work and would scream at us for hours on end that nothing worked because he broke it.

BTW The dudes who worked the .COM boom/bust stuff are hitting their 50s. When you are on your 15th uber framework sometimes you just wing it and dig in only if you have to. Or as I say to my fellow devs 'what useless tech skill am I going to learn today that I did not want to know about'. For my first couple of stacks I can tell you everything you want to know for hours on end. For current ones that passion is mostly gone. Crunched out of me with endless meetings and forms to fill out.

I would say 90% of their customers don’t want to be hacking their router, and 90% of those that do don’t really know what they’re doing.

Probably. And in that case, the ISP would be even more justified in not supporting “non standard” configurations.

So they can say:

Connect the modem we gave you with our settings, and if it works using that it’s not our problem.

It’s not that hard.

The support angle is the party line for why they want to own the boxes, but there has never been any actual data to back this up. Further I do not see this being a real problem, hell I use a custom router but if I have a problem I have hook up the ISP router to talk to customer service, I am fine with that.

The real reason they want this is 2 fold

1. Money. it is always money. They want to be able to advertise "Internet for only $30" but then tack on 20-30 in "other fees" to get that bill up, $5-10 for a router is an easy gain

2. Control. Companies like comcast have lots of control over the endpoints to the point where they can manipulate the firmware do do what ever they need for traffic management or even offer public wifi access to all your neighbors...

1 really doesn’t hold water. Some ISPs in the US still waive the fee if you don’t rent equipment, so that doesnt really strengthen the argument. I now have an ISP that doesn’t waive the fee but that doesn’t matter either, since it is not optional it is just part of the total sunk cost. I still use my own router.

Your whole argument doesn’t hold water because even with Comcast you can bring your own equipment. They don’t go out of their way to help you... but they don’t stop you either. Don’t see how that is “control”.

Maybe you will not call tech support when your own equipment fails but you clearly have no experience in a support role if you think other people won’t!

Just spend some time on GitHub issues for more popular open source projects to get an idea, and the multiply that by at least 10 for the general public.

Both Comcast and my current ISP both simply refuse to assist if you do not have their equipment. I have experiences both "Please hook up your ISP provided router and if you are still experiencing problems please call back"

Hell half the time they do not even help when you do have their equipment. It took me 3 months of calling support before my current ISP agreed to send a tech to look at my ONT that was clearly resetting itself, Tech replaced the ONT has not had any problems since.

ISP, all ISP's, customer service is terrible, there is not a ISP on the planet that has good service. Or atleast in the US

I don’t disagree with your points 1 and 2, but IME having worked in telecom for more than a decade your point about there being no data to back it up is wrong. Probably no data that you have been privy to, yes. Your lack of exposure to data does not equate to a lack of data. IME, internal analysis of trouble tickets along with unit cost is driving most moves by an ISP to make installation and usability simple, automated, and specifically not result in support calls. Remember that 90+% of their customers have the expectation that it just works like a power utility and buy their kids’ gaming machines from Costco and Walmart. They really don’t care about config customization and prioritize the assumption that it “just works” far above their flexibility to load custom firmware.

> The ISP often doesn’t want the end user to be able to do things like enable IPv6 and things that could boost the effectiveness of Bittorrent.

In what country are ISPs blocking ipv6 because it makes BitTorrent effective?

I didn’t say that ISPs are disabling IPv6 because it has any connection to Bittorrent, I said that IPv6, on one hand, and Bittorent-accelerating features, on the other hand, are two things that some ISPs in various countries may want to block.

For example, in Poland the router that Orange forced fiber customers to accept for 2019 came with closed-source firmware, and while there was a hack to enable IPv6, the ISP – who alone had superuser privileges on the device – issued a command to the router each night at midnight to disable IPv6, because it considered IPv6 a "beta" feature not meant for wide use (a limbo it has been stuck in for years now). The customer, without access to the router internals, had no way to permanently override it. Fortunately, if I understand correctly, EU legislation is phasing out any obligation to accept only the ISP-provided router.

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