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by crazygringo
1918 days ago
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OK, so this argues that consumer routers are bad. However, no evidence is presented that "business class" routers, as the author calls them, are any better. And the "Consumer Router Alternatives" section [1] of the site is entirely non-helpful. Just 20 random bullets of different brands with unhelpful notes like "I have no experience with them", "I have heard good things", and "build your own router". The first bullet that recommends the "Peplink" router justifies it solely with... Peplink's own product page. Which is the furthest you can get from an unbiased third-party evaluation. Don't the same companies make enterprise routers and consumer routers? Don't they presumably employ the same engineers to write software across them? All of the arguments against consumer routers seems like they could apply against enterprise routers too, unless there's real evidence otherwise. But this post, unfortunately, seems to be quite evidence-free. :( [1] https://routersecurity.org/resources.php |
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Kinda but not really (the consumer routers are usually made by subsidiaries, e.g. linksys -> Cisco)
> Don't they presumably employ the same engineers to write software across them?
For the most part no, but much more importantly the margins are much worse on consumer gear. Race-to-the-bottom pricing means race-to-the-bottom quality and race-to-the-bottom patch cycles (the last one is probably the most important). Add in that there is a deliberate effort to not make low-margin consumer gear not cannibalize high-margin business/enterprise gear.
A noted exception to this is NetGate, whose pfSense hardware runs the same OS with the same engineering up and down the stack. Probably not the best idea for a normal consumer to buy, though.