Free routers are good for marketing but out of warranty replacements can be more than desired, worse if tied into contract. Still mass market, just not cunsumer focused. Great spotting ex-sky routers in used on these forums

Free router is not that valuable to some but BT and I presume other operators make use of their Hub for remote desktop assistance for support calls and is valuable to many punters.

Why not offer both options.

Long term contract and router, or short term contract and no router. Best of both world, where the customer can chose.

Free routers are invaluable to the majority who are not familiar with networking, as I was to start with.

ISPs usually supply reasonable routers like the Netgear DG834G range.

They did,as they don't appear to supply netgear DG834xx routers any more, Thompson (Technicolor ) dlink and other's seem to be the order of the day now, and some isp's supply router's that are a poor match to their exchange equipment,
But free routers are fairly insignificant to me in deciding which isp to migrate to my bebox is in it's box, my netgear performs better

Edited by tommy45 (Tue 25-Jan-11 02:20:26)

I am a believer of choice and I agree with the thought of letting the customer choose, short term contract no freebie or long term contract with router.

My experiences of included routers are mixed.

aaisp - zyxel, was poor and after brief usage was put to one side, felt very light and cheap.
VM - dir615, probably is cheap judging by its size however with the ddwrt firmware turns out to be a quite a decent router and I like it. although this is baring in mind I have a decent gigabit router alongside it on my lan.
VM - superhub, very poor router in my view, was looking forward to it at first as it had potentioal to remove the need of having a modem and router seperate on cable, but as its so poor I have needed to use DMZ and hook up the dir615 to it anyway. Buggy and too dumbed down. Its so poor VM are even working on a bridge mode firmware to make it the same as a standalone modem.

However my overall view free routers are a good thing because without one the user will likely just have a modem, like my dad does with orange, whenever I go round there I cannot hook up my laptop as he just has a modem connecting his own machine up directly which is also less secure due to no NAT.

Edited by Chrysalis (Mon 07-Feb-11 02:25:24)

A few operators are offering 1 month terms or the option for a contract.

Everybody has a contract, with different minimum length terms.

Last time I counted over half the ISPs did monthly contracts. They probably account for less than 10% of users.

The cost of customer acquisition is put as one of the biggest costs in retail broadband, so I guess the idea of a long contract is to reduce churn and hence acquisition costs. Supplying a router reduces support costs if you're familiar with it and/or provide remote access via its WAN, though few do this.

In reply to a post by _Resonance_:

Why not offer both options.

Long term contract and router, or short term contract and no router. Best of both world, where the customer can chose.

AOL did that for a while, when I moved from Metronet to AOl they gave me a month contract as i had my own router, but if I had one of theirs it would be 12 months. i bet they don't do that now that Talktalk have grabbed them.


i prefer to get my own router and short contracts and sometimes the one the ISP supplies is useless for longer lines.

Take Talk Routers, the one with the Chinese name, we replaced one at a friends place with a speedtouch and it made a fair bit of difference, for a while anyway.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

which is also less secure due to no NAT.

Doesn't follow! 1 PC = 1 IP and no wireless to hijack. Only trouble with modem is it tops out at about 4 Meg.

can't say the idea of an external IP on a windows PC enthuses me in the hands of a novice.