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This is why you should replace your ISP’s Router ASAP

These days, people have more devices connected to their home Wi-Fi than ever. TVs, game consoles, appliances, phones, computers, and more. Most homes are a pretty complex system of connected devices today, and here’s the thing about routers provided by your ISP: nine times out of ten, they are pretty cheap. This is hardware the company is handing out to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of customers. Giving everyone a cutting-edge router would cost way too much.

They aren’t as powerful, and that means they often struggle throughout the day. You may face sluggish response times on your devices if there are multiple doing bandwidth-heavy tasks at the same time. Just one person streaming a video could impact performance throughout the whole house. Newer routers, especially those with Wi-Fi 6 or 7, are designed for dense networks and tons of connected devices. They can handle dozens of connected clients and give them all the prioritized bandwidth they need.

This means buying your own router is likely to pay for itself within a year, and if you’re going to be spending the same amount of money overall anyway, why settle for a router that is inferior to what you could buy? Moreover, if you buy the latest router with the newest technology, even if new upgrades come out, it’ll probably still be perfectly viable for at least a few years, not becoming obsolete nearly as quickly.

Even if you buy a used router, it might still be a mroe cost-effective option than paying for the ISP’s router.

Earlier, I mentioned Wi-Fi 6 and 7. These are Wi-FI standards used to denote how advanced the Wi-Fi technology is. Right now, Wi-Fi 6 is probably the most common standard in Wi-Fi routers, but there are already some Wi-Fi 7 routers out there. Your ISP is almost certainly not going to provide you with a Wi-Fi 7 router, because that’s expensive when an ISP has to buy routers in bulk. You’re much more likely to get a router with Wi-Fi 6 or in some cases, even the older Wi-Fi 5 standard.

Now, it may not seem that bad to use an older protocol. Allegedly, Wi-Fi 5 routers can provide up to 3.5Gbps throughput, which should be more than enough for a lot of different things. However, real world speeds are usually lower than this alleged throughput, so you may still want Wi-Fi 6. Moreover, newer Wi-Fi standards come with more than just raw performance, they also have newer features.

For example, Wi-Fi 6 comes with OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access), which allows those routers to ping multiple devices at the same time instead of relying on a request que. This can massively reduce the latency you experience compared to older Wi-Fi standards.

If you ever have a problem with your ISP-issued router, you will probably need to get help from them to fix it. In order for them to do that, they usually set up the CPE WAN Management Protocol so they can access the router remotely. Admittedly, this is pretty convenient when you need their help to fix some serious problem, but nevertheless, it is a potential security risk.

After all, this type of backdoor allows anyone who knows how to access it change settings, see connected devices, or monitor your activity. While it’s not very likely, a total stranger could theoretically do this and spy on you, and this is especially concerning since a lot of ISP routers use outdated security standards. Security standards grow over time much like Wi-Fi standards do, and today, the most used standard is WPA3.

But just like Wi-Fi standards, ISPs don’t always update their routers to the newest security standards. It can mean further training and complications for their technicians, and they just don’t have much of a financial incentive to do so, since most people will take their shoddy routers when getting new service anyway. If the router is running an older security standard, it can be even easier for bad actors to access that backdoor the ISP put in your device.

You may not be able to change All Settings on an ISP Router

While this may vary based on the exact provider, but many ISPs don’t want their customers messing around with the advanced settings of their loaned routers, since that could make remote troubleshooting more difficult. With a lot of ISP routers, the customer won’t be able to change anything other than the network name and password. Admittedly, this might not be an issue for most people who don’t want to mess around with more complicated settings anyway.

But if you’re the type of person who wants full access to their router and its provided network, such as network band selection or UPnP functionality, you’ll want to ditch the ISPs router and get your own. Aftermarket routers will let you change literally anything you want, from device specific parental controls to custom DNS. If you want flexibility, you’ll want your own personal router.

Firmware updates are very important. They are put out by the manufacturer of the router to patch fatal flaws, like holes in security or other performance issues. It’s like getting a security update for your laptop. However, unlike your personal computer, you don’t get to choose when an ISP router gets a firmware update. It’s completely up to the ISP, and they aren’t always acting with real urgency. It’s up to the ISP to test and approve a firmware update before it gets applied to your router.

This process can take weeks or sometimes even months, which is practically an eternity is the world of security exploits. In some cases, it may never happen at all. After all, the ISP could just choose not to push a new firmware update if they don’t want to. This could leave the router you are using vulnerable to all sorts of problems.

Naturally, this isn’t an issue if you buy your own router. With that, you’ll be able to apply a new firmware update whenever you see fit, instead of relying on some company that may be dragging its feet. There are plenty of reasons to ditch whatever router an ISP tries to give you and go buy your own instead.

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