[Bloat] Re: Consumer CPE with Modern AQM?

Jim Gettys
2026-02-17T04:12:42Z

On Mon, Feb 16, 2026, 12:46 PM Daniel Sterling <sterling.daniel@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I mean no disrespect, but surely large ISPs should be pushing their
> CPE vendors for this functionality? I don't know what the general
> community (represented on this list) might be able to do to help here
>

Jason, I have said this to your face before at least 10 years ago, and now
I will say it again on the mailing list. One of the pieces of leverage that
a major ISP such as Comcast has is its recommended hardware list, not just
the hardware that you guys distribute directly. Best of course if you
arrange a somewhat neutral third party to pick the winners, but somebody's
got to start picking the hardware on an ongoing basis that actually works
well. As you know because you've been one of the people enabling testing in
the first place, it can be impossible to easily tell the difference between
buffer bloat and the last mile hop of the ISP, or the last Wi-Fi hop from
the CPE. In fact it can easily switch from one to the other on a second by
second basis.

Even 10 years ago we lacked even the basic tests to expose the problem.
That's been a solved problem now for quite a while, though testing needs to
be done carefully, And doing reproducible Wi-Fi testing is definitely a
challenge due to radio interference and the shared nature of the
transmission channel.

If Comcast and other major ISP's made it clear to the vendors of home
routers and other cpe equipment that they would be penalized explicitly if
they failed Wi-Fi bufferbloat or other buffer bloat testing, that is
probably the fastest way to get the Wi-Fi side of these CPE devices fixed,
or at least reduced to a semi-manageable level.

You and other ISP's have more leverage on what happens in Taiwan and China
by the market power and influence that your companies hold then all of us
geeks do on this mailing list.

A volunteer organization like bufferbloat.net is not in a position to run
such tests in a unbiased way. There are various organizations in the
internet ecosystem which do such testing, and can charge money to get the
testing done for such equipment on an ongoing basis. We have the tests in
hand these days, and by systematically encouraging and publishing the test
results, we can get the chip vendors, which is typically the hold up with
Wi-Fi these days, to pay attention as it will start costing them money, And
ensure that their firmware and device drivers do not just work but don't
add tons of bloat buried in places where we have no chance of touching it.

The same thing happens with the cable chipsets buried in the integrated
equipment Comcast and others provide, but there are just a few chipset
vendors you need to coerce into proper buffer management. And typically as
I understand it, you retain control on the firmware that often runs on the
cable chipsets, though I gather even you sometimes need to take cudgels to
certain chip vendors for the broadband chips.

Each generation of these WIFi chipsets of each WiFi chip vendor usually
needs work in their firmware and or their device drivers, BUT you, the ISP
will continue to take service calls from your customers due to buffer
bloat, until this problem is exposed and something that people can vote
with their dollars about, and the people who build the silicon understand
that they can't get away with crap firmware and device drivers and the
current dismal ecosystem found on these devices.

The worst thing about the Chinese ecosystem of CPE equipment is generally
that it's the cheapest and often is running truly antique and insecure
versions of Linux under the covers, and they actually lack the ability to
do more than take what the chipset vendors give them in a sample Linux,
often many years out of date, as that is the running reference software In
the boards that the chip vendors make has samples for the high volume
manufacturers. There is typically nobody home they're they're capable of
that engineering if indeed they have access to the firmware that runs in
some of these chips or in the device drivers. That has meant that only a
small fraction of the overall ecosystem have enabled it to be even possible
to do the necessary technical work in the bowels of the system.

There are a few exceptions to this generality as in the bufferbloat.net
list of things that have debloated code, and many of them ultimately trace
their upstreams to OpenWrt or other open software In some form, but the
reality is that these board support packages are generally seldom updated
to again become current with OpenWrt and other open er source development
occurs. Often half a decade goes by without a chip vender bothering to
update to what we consider up-to-date software.

So even if we got things fixed and working well in OpenWrt, before that
work hands off in consumer gear can actually be many years, if ever, In the
box you can buy at Best buy or online for the least money. And you guys
get it on the chin with service calls has people plug this junk into their
home network.

I'm happy to chat at length with you by phone about how this dysfunctional
ecosystem functions, to the detriment of all.

Essentially, until we name and shame and make it hurt in the CPE vendors
pocketbooks, by making the problem visible for customers and make vendor
choice active in the economic equation, we will continue to fight buffer
bloat not just for the last 15 years but for the next 15 or 50 years. This
has not actually been a technology problem for quite a while. This is a
market failure and unless we treat it that way, we will live with
bufferbloat indefinitely.

All the best, and my thanks for all the support that Comcast, more than
most/all other major ISP's, have given this project from very early on. It
is truly appreciated by us here, myself maybe even more than most on the
list can know. And you were the person who has made that support happen.

You know how to call me! I'm in your contacts list. I'm happy to explain
how this dysfunctional mess of an ecosystem actually works.

All the best and again all my thanks,

Jim Gettys

or are you hinting that someone should start a company / release a
> product with good SQM support? :)
>
> I for one (as a home user) would be glad to buy some hardware that
> advertised support for cake (and IPv6) -- right now I just run a linux
> box plugged into my PON ONT (spoofing the MAC address of the ISP's
> CPE, so I can fully bypass it). but getting IPv6 working properly was
> a huge pain and I'm afeared to upgrade the linux version lest I break
> it
>
> -- Dan
>
> On Mon, Feb 16, 2026 at 11:51 AM Livingood, Jason via Bloat
> <bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >
> > Any recent news on home router CPE that supports fq_codel or cake, etc.?
> I see a lot of end users on our network that would benefit from this but do
> not want to run/manage OpenWrt.
> >
> > Thanks
> > Jason
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