I had a dumpy router+modem combo thing provided by time warner once and they made me pay like $10 monthly to make the wifi capabilities that it had either way work, and I didn't even realize they were doing that, so now I just always expect things like that from ISP-provided routers. and just whatever they can to make sure the user has to spend money somehow to make stuff work. it ps me o. I wouldn't be surprised if some such routers didn't even let the user edit the settings
I mean for sp0nge80b it's still a good idea to try but I'm explaining why I'm wary
AT&T provided a stuff potato combo router for my grandparents too. idk if they had to pay extra for anything but it had problems with randomly disallowing wireless devices to connect after a certain number or something which i could never figure out how to fix. it definitely did allow the user to change settings tho, and i'm also pretty sure it allowed port forwarding. but i think they've since moved away from that particular model, hopefully to a better one, but duno
my experience with the equipment that charter spectrum gave us has been pretty good though. the router they provide is actually pretty Nice, and there haven't been any problems with the modem so far. haven't had so much luck before in the past. i think when we had mediacom in a stuff tiny town they actually didn't even give us a router for w/e reason, or it was an extra fee or smth, so we had to buy one on our own