I’ve wondered the same. Pretty sure they just lean on the ISP equipment offerings and outsource the rest to the cloud. Critically, I envision plug and play users who don’t give a shit about security or privacy, and that simplifies a lot.
Honestly if you take that setup from the ISP (which I think is often free and now usually includes a docsis 3.x with at least one repeater, installed) then just bump the default encryption and add a VPN, I wouldn’t say it’s a bad way to go at all, mainly because when there’s any issue it’s on the ISP to fix it.
It won’t be bleeding edge and you won’t be able to do any directed networking fanciness without your own gear, but the not my problem perk is nothing to sneeze at.
And yeah mesh is a headache. It’s all wired backhaul (sfp+ and copper) but nodes regularly fall out of sync and the mesh doesn’t heal properly. Main reason I kept coming back was the benefit of co-channel stacking, which makes your signal footprint small but really deep so neighboring routers move over.
I guess? My local ISP did offer to set up a mesh, which I did briefly try. Interestingly, they hijack your router settings and after that you had to call them to make config changes, which I never understood but may have been a “save you from yourself” thing for normal users.
The hardware was so bad that it didn’t solve the issue, though, and the inability to change anything on the setup was crippling. I don’t get the feeling that too many people bought that service in the first place.
But if you don’t get good enough wifi you don’t get good enough wifi. Normies will notice that. My frustration ended up being that all the cheapo, built-in solutions without fancy features were noticeably flaky or slow. Security wasn’t even in that picture.
