AT&T - BGW210 Wi-Fi Gateway

Just to illustrate the BS of "best you can afford" ... My apartment is one unit in a three-flat (that I own). As an incentive I offer free WiFi to residents in other units, I tell them I have gigabit fiber (which I do). During the pandemic, there were six people living upstairs, four that were WFH, one a web developer and when I asked "how's the WiFi" they said it was really good. All that (plus me) was on the ATT-provided BGW-210, with GbE wired to a TP-Link WDR-3600 as an AP.

It depends on the size of your house, construction, and all that. The standard ATT wifi 5 fiber router worked great when I was in a 1br flat. Now, I live in a 1br two story concrete building with a structured wiring enclosure and the ONT in my ~~bedroom~~ closet with 20-30 IoT devices connected. Would get 10mbps on WiFi in the loft til I put the stock router in bridge mode and got a new router with more antennae and wifi6. Tried an extender from ATT since I have wired to the loft, went to 100mbps, but was still kinda unreliable for some reason. If I tried to set up iot stuff far away from the router, it would sometimes fail to connect or lose signal with my lights upstairs and mess up automations. After the new router? Everything's more reliably connecting/automating. Also most Americans with the disposable income to be buying these routers live in larger homes, so they probably have a decent sized need to get signal around places. So you're not wrong that the stock ones aren't as bad as they used to be but there's still plenty of reasons to run your own. Edit: closet, note about extender.