except thanks to availability crisis hitting the industry for the past decade you have to go with the 4mb sometimes
just look at wifi routers. in the usa and China they are all sold with 64 or 128mb ram. south America and Europe they are all 16 or 32 for no clear reason.
Do you have some examples? I have a very hard time imagining a modern Wifi router supporting the latest standards and IPv6, admin web interface and so on running on 16 MB of RAM. I also have issue with "wifi routers in Europe are all 16 or 32 MB of RAM". In what decade?
My ISP provided router also does VPN, VoIP, mesh networking, firewalling, and it's towards the lower end of feature set (as it's offered for free and not a fancy router I bought).
Are you talking about devices from the early 2000?
I’ve still got two MR3040. TP-Link hasn’t released any update for them in years. You can run an older version of OpenWrt on them, but there’s no real point. These things don’t even support 5GHz WiFi.
pick any modem from linksys or dlink or netgear. then buy one in south America and compare what's really inside
look at all the revB on openwrt wiki, sometimes ram lowers. sometimes arm cpu change to mediatek. often the wifi chip changes from qualcomm to rtl. and it's always the revisions sold outside of usa and China in the observation fields.
> south America and Europe they are all 16 or 32 for no clear reason
I don't know where you're getting your data from but it's clearly wrong or outdated. These are the most often sold routers in Czechia on Alza (the largest online retailer) under $100:
just look at wifi routers. in the usa and China they are all sold with 64 or 128mb ram. south America and Europe they are all 16 or 32 for no clear reason.