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by phh 743 days ago
Counterpoint: ISP with over 1M customers have the incentives of upgrading their HGW "forever" to reduce Capex. My employer (Free, French ISP also shipping HGW to Italia as Iliad) still upgrade their HGW released in 2011 (though if you have yours dating back from 2011, have it replaced (your oled screen is probably dead ;) to get more recent wifi cards). It runs a modern Linux 6.4. You get modern nifties like airtime QoS, got upgraded mobile apps if you wish, and uh lots of software features.
2 comments

In Germany one of the more popular modem/router/wifi devices among ISPs is FritzBox. You can also buy these devices yourself, which gives you both: you're using your own hardware instead of renting, and you benefit from long support thanks to aligning incentives from their big customers.
FritzBox are also very famous for getting service on lines where other vendors will just crap out. Their chipsets and tunings are top-notch.

In addition, the backwards compatibility is amazing. It's 2024, and to my knowledge most of their models still support pulse dialling on the analog telephone frontend.

Although expensive, they've always had good fame (and I even had a friend working from them years ago), but something "funny" was going on with their routers some months ago...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40106336

Yeah that's because they used .box as a custom TLD for decades and either didn't get the introduction of .box as a legitimate TLD or failed to secure fritz.box in time.

Not the first time this has happened, and likely won't be the last either.

Currently the fritz.box domain seems to be owned by AVM (the makers of the FritzBox). Maybe it was just not existing and the local resolver on the box got confused? The domain was created in January and updated only a few days ago so things might actually have changed in the meantime...
Some scammers front-ran the registration to run NFT bullshit, AVM eventually managed to pull the domain with ICANN URS [1].

[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Fritz-box-Domain-aus-dem-Verkehr-g...

.dev entered the chat
Are they still? I did try on a 5490 a few years ago and it totally ignored the pulses... an older one accepted the pulse dialling but it was not working all the time. Just tried with a single phone so maybe it was the phone ;-)
I'd like the record to show that the upgraded mobile apps are significantly worse than the old ones. The old ones are currently still available to download, for now.