You know companies will, as regular practice just give you a laptop to work on. Some will even provide a phone or tablet. These are not cheap. Not cheap at all.
I've yet to hear of a company which would fleet-buy routers reflash with OpenWRT and hand them out.
Why?
Because it wouldn’t work. It’s completely infeasible for an moderate sized non-tech business because the “IT environment”, such as it were, of employees homes is absolutely non-homogenous.
You can, as an end-user IT support department, rely on basically only two things about any user’s home kit and ability to interface with it: they have power (usually), and they can probably get internet access via wifi somehow. Any other assumption about their home environment will prove incorrect in some wild way.
I’ve run into users that don’t have Ethernet, or WPA2, or any kind of public IP, or next hop latency under 200ms, or more than 1mbps bandwidth. We have users that don’t have home Internet, and for the duration of WFH orders used their company provided phone as a hotspot. I’ve run into users who can’t promise that they’ll have mains power day to day.
Even if the user does have Ethernet coming out whatever their NTD might be (and it might be exotic!) you can’t guarantee that they can follow any kind of instruction to set up a router: they are about as likely to end up without a functional internet connection at all as they are to get whatever box it is you give them to work.
You also can’t even be sure your instructions will work for whatever it is you’re trying to do. Are you taking into account double NATing? Triple? Do you know that none of your users home ISPs have some kind of MAC whitelist on their NTD? What if their current router is built into some kind of HFC modem?
This is not a problem you can solve the mass use case for and address the edge cases: it’s all edge cases, in my experience… and that’s if you’re operating in a single, highly developed first world country.
Usually this is not the problem... till some protocols what rely on port numbers. Like those used in audio/video conferencing. Then it's hell.
Overall I want to upvote you twice.
The only working way to provide a such thing would be to hand out the one with a mobile modem integrated, SIM inserted, configured, with WiFi SSID and password written on the case with at least 32pts. And still there would be problems.
The stuff we ran into in the suburbs of a major US manufacturing center... Oof. I very quickly learned that a LOT of people really don't have much in the way of internet access at home.
Some other stories:
- The person who complains that a Windows 10 upgrade broke their application and they can no longer work. Real problem? Their home network connection was 2mbit symmetric DSL and the database they were working on would time out sending large results back to them. They seemed embarrassed by their connectivity and concerned about their job due to their internet access. After I managed to find out the real bandwidth and repro the problem, the site was fixed to work on low bandwidth and all was good.
- Users presuming that data on their work-provided mobile phone was unlimited. They'd use it for work, but also their kids' school-from-home, and whatever video streaming... And when you try to push a few hundred GB a month through a mobile, it gets throttled. Key here was when they finally mentioned that they "have bought two other phones but they all have the problem too" as I was able to figure out what was going on.
- Then the guy who was working from "home" but after a lot of digging I saw him VPN'ing from southwest Asia. Guy, I don't care that you hurried back to your home country when COVID hit so you could be with your family. Please just be honest with me when I'm trying to help you get working, because we have solutions for this too. (Eg: Remote work via virtualized desktop instead of trying to load big CAD models locally.)
Hell, the number of sysadmin-type IT folks who are double or triple NATing, with bargain-basement "range extenders" in every room of their house, who then exclaim BUT I AM NOT A NETWORK PERSON when I suggest that is why their wireless at home flaps like crazy is unbelievable. Or probably not for you. ;)
Honestly, though, stuff just kinda comes up and pops into my head. I also need to be careful when sharing not to disclose anything that'd be confidential. There's random things on https://nuxx.net, but otherwise... Nothing comes to mind?
Honestly, in my experience here in the US, /most/ people's home networks are just fine. There's just edge cases, and then there's weirdness like this.
I think COVID WFH / School-From-Home was actually a boon for internet access in the US as it forced a lot of people to think about their home internet connection as more than just a binary works/doesn't.
Something like this, for a large company, would be another massive thing to maintain. It'd be a whole additional cost to buy, platform to manage and support and patch and upgrade. And people would still just plug them into whatever network jack they see.
Then there's the whole management/update infrastructure that'd have to be built and secured and maintained... It'd basically be like reimplementing what Cisco offers with Meraki, a small remote VPN box, but for everyone. Not cheap at all, and for most users, just not necessary.
...use it for Netflix and actually hit the "unlimited" data caps and get throttled.
...name their mobile network the same as their home network with the same password.
...place the phone somewhere weird (in the basement where they work, up against an earth-backed concrete/rebar wall, and complain that it's "too slow".
There's almost no end to weird things people can do with tech and then blame just the tech. There are constant new problems that need to be handled on a case by case basis, because the root causes are not solvable solely by technical means.
Like sure, you could ship a router, firewall, IPS, WAF, et all. But if you're not stopping outbound, controlling clients ability to talk to each other, and blocking things like UPNP, then you're still basically on an untrusted network.
Your options are basically make the network unuseable or mark it untrusted.
At that point you might as well just force all traffic through a VPN.
So there's not even the cost of reflashing them.
- How do you patch and update them? - How do you deploy configuration changes? - How do you support them as they break? - How do you refresh them as they go EOL / get outdated?
And, while this could solve the router layer problem, it doesn't solve the problems with people's home internet connections. Almost no one would use this in place of their home router, so it'll get plugged into them, and then this becomes nothing more than an additional layer of complexity on top of the home network.