600% Memory Price Surge Threatens Telcos' Broadband Router, Set-Top Box Supply (counterpointresearch.com)
- Reference: 0180788214
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/13/1921232/600-memory-price-surge-threatens-telcos-broadband-router-set-top-box-supply
- Source link: https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/7times-memory-price-surge-threatens-telcos-broadband-router-set-topbox-supply
Routers, gateways and set-top boxes [1]have been hit hardest , far worse than smartphones; prices for "consumer memory" used in broadband equipment jumped nearly 7x over the last nine months, compared to 3x for mobile memory. Memory now makes up more than 20% of the bill of materials in low-to-mid-end routers, up from around 3% a year ago. Counterpoint expects prices to keep rising through at least June 2026. Telcos that were also looking to push AI-enabled customer premises equipment -- requiring even more compute and memory content -- face additional headwinds.
[1] https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/7times-memory-price-surge-threatens-telcos-broadband-router-set-topbox-supply
Dear Bubble, pop already! (Score:1)
ya know you wanna
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously. Can't wait for all the high end shit to flood ebay and become cheap.
ISPs have forgotten what their job is. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see why a device that simply shuffles data between the internet and your house needs more than 100 MB. Let's be charitable and say 1GB (which was an absurd amount needed only to power high-end servers and workstations just a couple of decades ago). Looking on Digikey, you can still get the cheapest 1GB chip for $3, retail. This is worth about two days of a $50/month internet connection fee.
Luckily, I have an old ISP box that they doled out before all their equipment had to be a router, and I doubt that it has even 1GB inside. My own WiFi router runs OpenWrt just fine with 128MB. If ISPs would just stick to their core mission of delivering packets, this memory crisis wouldn't be a problem for them at all.
that is not a great take (Score:1)
Contra to your view of OpenWRT on some old-ass router with 128MB of memory, modern routers are high performance devices and need a pretty beefy CPU, and "the cheapest 1GB chip" on Digikey probably doesn't interoperate with that CPU. High-end servers and workstations from a couple decades ago would not be able to function as a router and saturate multiple multi-gigabit ports without considerable hardware assistance.
Second, whether or not you could make a design work with 128MB of memory (that doesn't leave a
Re: that is not a great take (Score:2)
That, and a $3 component is a *really* expensive one. $3 instead of $0.50 on 10,000,000 devices is $25,000,000.
Re: (Score:2)
NAT is a scourge.
Use IPv6, turn off state tracking for your torrent server. I have a setup like this and the router requires very little memory even running bidirectional torrents at multi gigabit speeds.
Re: (Score:2)
A regular layer 3 router requires very little memory...
But once you add kludges like NAT the requirements go up a lot.
Many consumer routers also have other features - vpn connections, web servers, file servers etc. All of this adds to the system requirements. Yes they should be on their own devices, but many users don't realise this and just go for the higher numbers / more checkboxes.
I'm just waiting.. (Score:2)
Until some company like lockheed martin, exxon mobil, nestle or boeing to get hit by it when they try to renew the offices or servers.
It's not even that many people that need to be "convinced" to make the RAM prices go back to normal.
The Art of Exaggeration (Score:2)
As if set top boxes are made of pure ram and nothing else.
Re: The Art of Exaggeration (Score:2)
It's called pure Ramonium!
Good news (Score:2)
Maybe now they will let me use my own router.
eh (Score:1)
Why do they need top of the line ram for? Sure a LOT fo smaller foundries can produce ram that's suffeciant.
So that's AI's endgame (Score:2)
Impoverish memory at the edge so beneficent AIs are hard to create. Push more people to using the centralised AI.
If the DoD used Claude to plan the Maduro abduction, it's not a stretch to think Altman used ChatGPT to plan AI domination
Seems like... (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems like "AI" causes more problems than it can ever solve.
Re: (Score:3)
Depends who's problem it's trying to solve.
I don't like the telco's box running my network. I really wouldn't like the telco's box with a bunch of processing capability and AI "features" running my network. I doubt they'd pay to install something like that in your house unless it was doing them some good though.
Re: (Score:3)
> I doubt they'd pay to install something like that in your house unless it was doing them some good though.
"unless it was doing them some good" - you mean like enabling the service you're giving them monthly payments for?
Re: (Score:1)
AI cornered the supply of RAM. Its obviously smarter than humans.
Oh yeah, I forgot, we give all the money to billionaires and then let them keep it. So they can pay more and buy the entire world supply. Great world.