600% Memory Price Surge Threatens Telcos' Broadband Router, Set-Top Box Supply (counterpointresearch.com) 71
Telecom operators planning aggressive fiber and fixed wireless broadband rollouts in 2026 face a serious supply problem -- DRAM and NAND memory prices for consumer applications have surged more than 600% over the past year as higher-margin AI server segments absorb available capacity, according to Counterpoint Research.
Routers, gateways and set-top boxes 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.
Routers, gateways and set-top boxes 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.
Seems like... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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?
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Oh my, you mean we're finally going to get internet connections now that we have AI?
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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.
Not a single part of this story is about "telco boxes with AI features. The ENTIRE story is about the impact of memory prices on normal telco equipment having surged due to AI demand elsewhere. I'm as anti-"AI" as you can get, but it sounds like YOU really could use one if THAT's the takeaway that your shit reading comprehension hallucinated from this story,
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Maybe you should run the summary through an LLM and ask for a summary?
Also, why are you so upset? General bad day? Work for a telco?
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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.
Re: Seems like... (Score:2)
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It seems like "AI" causes more problems than it can ever solve.
But, but, but, we just need to AI harder, then! MORE AI, MORE SOLUTION!
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The only "problem" that it is intended to "solve" is the "free will" issue that plagues humanity. With an AI assistant constantly threatening to call the police on your for your behaviors, this issue will finally be put to rest. The people who control AI want to control YOU.
Dear Bubble, pop already! (Score:2)
ya know you wanna
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Seriously. Can't wait for all the high end shit to flood ebay and become cheap.
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When it pops, it's likely to take the entire world economy down the drain with it. Memory will become cheaper, but will the consumers have any money to buy it?
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Don't threaten me with a good time.... seriously though, it needs to happen as it's a fake market anyway. We will recover.
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With luck it will be like the slow burn of the crypto fail. It is slowly retracing back to 0. And with luck it will be fools like microstrategy that take the brunt of the pain.
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:2, Informative)
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.
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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.
Bullshit.
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Second, whether or not you could make a design work with 128MB of memory (that doesn't leave a lot of room for buffers, for example and may have weird performance issues) the point is that the designs were made when RAM was cheap and plentiful and there's no time now to respin the designs. There could be good reasons for wasting RAM, including making it easy to use off-the-shelf kernels and other software without having to trim and cram, which enable doing software updates easily. Or, again, that the choice of CPU results in needing RAM pretty close to the cutting edge of what's available.
The software still exists to design something to work in 128MB. Buffers are not a problem because the router should not be buffering very much. State requirements are 4KB per connection, so 256 connections per 1MB.
The old m0n0wall did this with a stripped down FreeBSD, of which I forget the name, and would actually work in 64MB.
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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.
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Use IPv6, turn off state tracking for your torrent server.
Thanks for your suggestion. Now can you tell me how I can access my home server from my phone? From my work? Or from the 2/3rds of the internet that aren't able to route IPv6?
Re:ISPs have forgotten what their job is. (Score:4)
Android phones have supported ipv6 natively since 4.2 (2012). So unless you are rocking the OG droid or a Nexus One your phone probably does support it.
I can't speak to how woefully outdated your work network may be though.
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Every mobile device supporting LTE and 5G support IPv6. It's required as that's the only protocol supported by those systems. The carrier though, may not allow IPv6 traffic through and use CGNAT to get you onto the internet. Finding out which carriers do support IPv6 out is tricky and oft
Frontier is still IPv4-only (Score:2)
Android phones have supported ipv6 natively since 4.2 (2012).
Even if your device supports IPv6, if it's associated to a WLAN whose uplink is IPv4-only, it'll still have to operate on IPv4. The uplink of Frontier fiber Internet subscribers is IPv4-only.
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Why do you think anyone here is talking about software or the OS? Android supports IPv6, my mobile provider does not, so really it doesn't matter what you think I'm rocking.
As for the "woefully outdated" work network, I take it you've never worked in a big company before. I've never worked at, for, or contracted to a corporation that used IPv6. In fact up until last year my ISP's business didn't support IPv6 either, just the consumer one, much to the complaint of everyone. Ever travelled before? The times I
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NAT association tables require a lot of memory. Over the last few days I had been seeding multiple TBs a day worth of Epstein files. Without sufficient memory it could have been a challenge.
The NAT state requires 4KB per connection, so 256 connections per 1MB, hardly exorbitant. This is included in the "state" part of a stateful firewall.
Stateful firewalls are used because they are so much faster. Parts of the packet header are hashed to look up the routing information instead of evaluating the rules for every packet.
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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.
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NAT doesn't require that much memory. Certainly you can handle 64K connections with 128MB of it, and Linux certainly has bee
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That seems to be an US problem, i.e. one of failed capitalism. What I get here from my ISP (Europe) is a fiber that will serve one IP via DHCP and route that. I have to supply a GBX (optical terminator) and whatever I want on my side. Currently, I have a converter to copper Ethernet and an older Linux box as router/firewall and for some other things.
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it's actually pseudo-capitalism
we cannot have capitalism when the upper class owns 90% of all our capital. That only leaves 10% of all capital for the rest of us.
We are all poor, as in severely undercapitalized. This is exactly what economic slavery look like.
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Possibly, yes.
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Yes, we're owned or our assets are and our incomes are as are our freedoms. As in yes boss, no boss, right away boss. Nor are most people free of debt. The reality is most people work directly or indirectly for corporations controlled by the upper class. We work for them and we shop at their stores. It's a corporate town and most people are wage slaves. Not to even mention our fiat currencies. Very few people are 'independently' wealthy except those born into it.
No, clearly we live in a classist society des
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You may have gripes with our political-economy, but that doesn't make it what you say. You just look foolish for being unable to write with your head instead of your emotions.
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No they are not different they are exactly the same. Your need to be insulting rather than discuss demonstrates you have no real counter-argument
typical ad hominem trolling from classist people, classism is economic slavery and that is clearly what we have, thanks to greedy selfish people like you
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Had you not also ignored the preceding counterargument, I'd worry that I had erred and led you into a false inference.
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i overstepped, my apologies
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Most Fiber ISPs in the US do the same. Though they will usually supply the GPON or other adapter directly as these usually just plug into an SFP/SFP+ port. It should be noted these SFP modules are actually self contained modems and many have their own CPU and RAM to manage the connection.
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Sorry what? Shuffles data? I haven't had a router that shuffles data for a long time. My current ISP provided router doesn't just act as a cable modem, it's an 8 port managed 2.5GigE switch, maintains independent routing tables for IPv6 and IPv4, and while NAT support is trivial, what is less trivial these days is acting as a control hub for a Wifi Mesh network supporting 802.11a, b, g, n, ac, ah, ax, and s, for which you need support for HWMP which itself isn't simple to implement. It also acts as a VoIP
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I have a pretty old router by modern standards, a WRT1200AC. It has 512MB. This is sufficient for packet shuffling, it's got 380MB free now. But I also run transmission on it, I've got a 512GB SATA in a $3 AliExpress-sourced USB dongle for that (I forgot it has eSATA! oh well) and I use nfsv4 to get data from it to my PC, so it's nice it has a little RAM.
You made the only important argument: As you say, 1GB is less than $5, it's really just not a real problem. This is not going to have any serious impact on
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BSD allocates 4KB per connection for state tracking, which is pretty standard, so 256 connections per 1MB. For years I regularly ran 128MB BSD routers which were much more reliable than anything ISPs provided then or provide now. With 128MB, I never ran out of connections. 1GB would provide 256K connections. Even half of that is more than any reasonable bandwidth will support.
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.
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With the cocoa prices surging, chocolate chips don't look like a magic solution, either.
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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!
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Nothing is exaugurated here. You just don't understand the bill of materials. RAM is (or rather was) the second most expensive component in a set top box next to the CPU. Yes it is perfectly reasonable to expect RAM to make up 20% of the BOM cost when nearly all other parts are sub $0.50 components.
Good news (Score:2)
Maybe now they will let me use my own router.
eh (Score:1)
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I guess part of it is that any foundry that can make higher-end RAM is going to do that instead, because that's where the money is.
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
600% (Score:2)
Nope, AI companies keep buying hardware even if it hikes prices to 600%? Hear me out, this is what we should do. We consumers and regular companies just stop buying stuff for a year. I know, life will be a bit dull, but it is o
It threatens the entire economy (Score:1)
We became so terrified of socialism from years and years and years of anti-communist propaganda that we ignored other threats to capitalism and free commerce
Soon to become an infrastructure problem. (Score:2)
Should industries be blocked from monopolies too? (Score:2)
Is it any better when 10 companies create so much demand together that it might as well be a single company with a monopoly? Wish the root issue was identified and solved instead of this "stop certain people, some of the time" stuff.
Almost seems like a good school project. Force the kids to live suddenly without access to a modern convenience, and help them create their own "bill of rights" (what every person in a modern society should be guaranteed). Make all electronics suddenly stop working (on, then