Cox (Orange County) and Verizon Fios (Los Angeles) delivered routers with good-looking, seemingly randomly generated passwords printed on a label. It's been this way with Cox for at least six years.
Exactly. That’s because FiOS routers allow tech support and their website to acquire information about your network, including your WPA passphrase, devices connected on your local network and more.
For that reason alone it’s best to have your own equipment not tied to the ISP, IMO. The ISP can already see all of my plaintext traffic, DNS requests, and MITM all my sessions if they wish. I’d rather not give them full access to my private network on top of that.
