On Sep 16, 2026, at 5:02 PM, Brandon Martin via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
Is this really "expected behavior" from a customer edge router, these days?
Yes. These are consumer devices, and unlike the routers that we were used to when you had to set a lot of additional things (~20+ years ago). The expectation is that you plug them in and any ethernet port does the right thing. I’ve had good luck with these devices and are the ones that we recommend/use with our customers. Most of our customers don’t even complete the process to link the device so they can manage it, it’s an appliance just like a light bulb or anything else that requires little/no support to setup or configure. I have some scripts that I use to interact with their portal so we can make minor setting changes automatically, but this is much better than making sure the customer put the yellow cat 5 into the yellow rj45 port, which they honestly can’t identify the difference between rj45 and rj11. The number of customers who hear they are getting fiber and think they can use a cable modem is non-zero as well. It’s ok, we keep spares on the truck and they work reasonably well. The access network has protections against this, and the biggest problem we’ve had with setup of them is when there’s a bug or there’s no cellular service at the location. There’s a big gap in the mindset around this. The serial number can be setup remotely, but when there’s internet access it would be nicer if the phone/app would handle this situation better. (Eg: imagine setting one up when connected via satellite when in a remote location - not really possible). The plusses of the buit-in speed test and this flexibility in auto-picking the upstream port is always positive thing. That you can use it to extend the lan as well over wireless to a wired device is also a plus. - Jared Ps: not an AD, just based on my own experiences with them, they are what I recommend