You can't just throw RAM at embedded devices that you make millions of and have extremely thin margins on. Have you bothered to look at the price of RAM today? At high numbers and low margins you can barely afford to throw capacitors at them, let alone precious rare expensive RAM.

No, XFinity are the ones who decided their routers “““need””” to have unwanted RAM-hungry extra functionality beyond just serving their residential customers' needs. Their routers participate in an entire access-sharing system so they can greedily double-dip by reselling access to your own connection that you already pay them for:

- https://www.xfinity.com/learn/internet-service/wifi

- https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/xfinity-wifi-hotspo...

We're talking about devices where the retail price is approximately one month of revenue from one customer, and that's if there isn't an extra fee specifically for the equipment rental. Yes, consumer electronics tend to have very thin margins, but residential ISPs are playing a very different game.