The goal is to make firewalling and controlling network traffic really easy.
The UI should be so easy a parent could perform difficult tasks such as limiting an iot devices traffic to local net or maybe just one ip using just an app.
Or detecting unusual patterns of traffic from a device or IP addresses.
The apis exist I can't think of many barriers to entry.
Another is to limit a device to communicate to a specific country. Easy enough however a possible performance issue.
In a choice between mandating people rent their routers, or pushing vendors to offer patches, I wouldn't bet on ISPs picking the latter.
It's what I've done for years and it works fine. I have a Pi-hole off my ISP modem, and the Pi-hole does DHCP, DNS, VPN, and more for our network at the same time as doing it's normal filtering job.
I'd love a better device where my Pi-hole is though, which I can configure easier, set up for my friends and family then they can manage it themselves, etc. There's definitely a market for this at least from me!
It's impenetrable to anyone that doesn't want to invest months into the scene and develop expertise in it. Much like phones we really need a PC equivalent in this space.
That's describing pretty much all the alternative firmware distributions, except OpenWRT, which is actually well-organized and delivers real stable releases. If you're digging through forums to find forks and builds made by some anonymous individual, it's almost certainly because you got fooled into buying hardware that requires closed-source drivers. (Or else you bought something that is just too new and not yet supported by OpenWRT.)
Bingo, that seems to be about all that's available. I'm looking at off the shelf hardware I can purchase locally, hardware I know works with local ISP's, I have no idea if we use the same standards as America for this stuff, what connections and adapters I'll need, etc. Buying locally eliminates these variables.
If there's a happy path by all means share. I only looked into this stuff in the first place so I could get set up a home server and my current modem/router is woefully out of date and has a very suspect definition of DMZ.
Your ISP is irrelevant, unless you're shopping for an integrated modem+router. Rule number 1 is don't do that, and keep your modem separate and just a modem. Then your router only needs the universal standard Ethernet port as its WAN interface, and at worst you might have to configure PPPoE instead of just using DHCP to get your public IP.
I think I'm going to have to go down this path, I was just hoping to avoid it. It means having another device to configure, another set of blinking lights, another weird shaped plug to try and squeeze into the power board and learning whatever PPPoE is just to transform Ethernet packets into the ADSL equivalent.
It also possibly means a more complicated setup controlling outbound connections so that a compromised server cannot reach the modem.
Easy and secure are not always a good match though. Take UPnP for example. Disabled by default on my ER-L, it can be enabled, but its ultimately insecure. And ultimately, HTTP over SSL could download payloads.