Why The ISP ONT routers supplied are so poor in functionality and/or performance ?

Like the Wifi-AP-Router OEM industry is fed by SoCs from a  few semiconductor players (Broadcom, Qualcomm - Atheros and Mediatek with few outliers like Marvell/NXP, OnSemiconductor, etc), the scenario for ONT router is not very different. The silicon for FTTH modem and wifi in these ONT router is provided by a very narrow set of players. And these are proprietary products.

The focus of ONT router OEMs is therefore just to:

(1) Develop the lowest cost jack-of-all-trades device with the stable basic features (modem + basic networking). These are usually given *free-of-cost to subscribers on sign-up.

(2) Make sure that the ONT/ONU and OLT (deployed in service provider end) can interwork smoothly and be managed from service priovider end 

 

Therefore the competency of the devices has never been home networks or Consumer networking. Therefore they will neither have great features, nor performance (speed, coverage, radio )

Less features and only basic imply less bugs, less enhancements/improvements and therefore very few or no firmware upgrades during lifecycle. The factories who mass roll out these low cost, high-scale, low-profit devices have no motivation for information security and infact maybe vulnerable to leave/create backdoors for governmental agencies and ISPs to get supply contracts.

Therefore it maybe more reasonable at the outset for users to just use these devices for what their basic capability is i.e. bridging ISP and Home network or Modem (it may perform better also in such a deployment). They should deploy a more powerful, competent and secure device to address their home networking needs.

- Suman Kumar Luthra @ APRC Telecom Special Interest Group