Most consumer ISPs and providers of any turnkey service have a problem: A significant number of their customers are of limited financial means and buy based on the advertising of how cheap they can have broadband for. If you're on a contractor daily rate, you are quite possibly buying on quality rather than price and can afford a premium router. I have many friends on zero hour contracts who are struggling to get by and for whom buying an expensive router isn't an option.
For ISPs engaged in the race to provide "the cheapest broadband in Britain" there is obvious pressure to keep their subscriber base up and overheads down. They don't want the support overhead of large numbers of support calls. Some, such as IIRC Sky, make it a condition of service that the subscriber uses their supplied router because the remote admin capabilities speed up fault resolution which, for the most part, gives shorter support calls and happier average customers. In this competitive sector, you just don't want customers writing all over Mumsnet/Facebook/Twitter how difficult it was to get your broadband working.
I bought myself a Netgear R8000 router to replace my aged one and the new-user experience was one I wish would be replicated by all makers. The router was turned on and connected to my broadband. The first time I opened a web browser and accessed a non-https site, I was redirected to the router setup web app where it looked at the incoming network to check if it was behind another router and set itself up with sensible defaults for the environment. I was then forced to change the admin password. It then invited me to change my wireless SSIDs and passwords. It was so easy.
The R8000 is a premium router with a lot of flash to put software in. It has room for all this stuff as well as being a good candidate for open source firmware. With the pressure makers must be under to sell bargain-basement ISPs their devices in bulk at the cheapest possible price, I'm not holding my breath for the day they start shipping more capable devices rather than cutting costs for something that the average customer won't notice, unless they are made to build to a security standard by law.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
