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Comment by pyuser583 | Hacker News Reader

The part about a cockroach colony is a bit unfair.

Insects love electronics, with the heat and noise they generate. And when electronics sit in storage for a long time, the critters can crawl in from neighboring items.

This is just as likely to happen with a non-ISP router.

Ok, in all fairness I don’t have any stats to back up that claim. But nobody else does either.

That open source router you love so much may have been sitting in storage even longer.

I have mixed feelings about ISP routers, and ISPs in general.

But insect infestation is a serious issue in consumer electronics and has nothing to do with ISPs.

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> the critters can crawl in from neighboring items

When it's shrink wrapped?

And why would a used device be on the shelf next to the new router I was buying?

You can argue this is "just as likely" with used devices, maybe. But if I'm buying a router it's not going to be used.

I agree with the take, unfortunately the new construction with Fiber to the home, this becomes less and less feasible, since ISPs expect to have routers with the fiber cable input as WAN port.

This is the case of Iliad in Italy.

In Germany you have FTTH installations where Telekom puts a mini Fiber Gateway in your home and an extra router dials with the credentials to access the internet. In this setup, you can use OpenWRT or other routers, rather than the Fritz!Box or the Speedport routers.

As long as there's a reasonable way to get an SFP module, there's a good amount of routers with those sockets and I can get a gigabit media converter for $20.

Yeah I’ve seen the buggers inside shrink wrap. Only dead ones though.

It is not unfair.

The linked article is about a live cockroach colony in the package when it was delivered from their ISP. If that went unnoticed, what would you think about their supply-chain security?

If you get insect-infested packages from wherever you get your electronics, you should switch suppliers. It is not normal.

I’ve learned from experience to check for insects in all packages.

Letters too.

They’re usually not there. And there more often dead than alive.

But from time to time, the critters to crawl out.

I once got a Sprint magic box full of cockroaches (not a router but a sort of femtocell that used another tower for backhaul). Thankfully UPS threw it out in the snow and I didn't discover it for a few days so the roaches froze to death.

So yes, ISP routers and associated equip I do not recommend!

If you can’t actually refute this then why say anything in the first place?

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