Technology

I think that, TP-Link aside, consumer broadband routers in general have been a security problem.

• They are, unlike most devices, directly Internet-connected. That means that they really do need to be maintained more stringently than a lot of devices, because everyone has some level of access to them.

• People buying them are very value-conscious. Your typical consumer does not want to pay much for their broadband router. Businesses are going to be a lot more willing to put money into their firewall and/or pay for ongoing support. I think that you are going to have a hard time finding a market with consumers willing to pay for ongoing support for their consumer broadband router.

• Partly because home users are very value-conscious, any such provider of router updates might try to make money by data-mining activity. If users are wary of this, they are going to be even more unlikely to want to accept updates.

• Home users probably don't have any sort of computer inventory management system, tracking support for and replacing devices that fall out of support.

• People buying them often are not incredibly able to assess or aware of security implications.

• They can trivially see all Internet traffic in-and-out. They don't need to ARP-poison caches or anything to try to see what devices on the network are doing.

My impression is that there has been some movement from ISPs away from bring-your-own-device service, just because those ISPs don't want to deal with compromised devices on their network.