I fear this won't even required SIM cards. I'm worried that Apple's Find My and Amazon's Sidewalk networks are the precursors of this: They're effectively company controlled p2p networks that lets the company use their customers' internet access points like a commodity. If one customer refuses to give a device access to the internet, they could use that network to route it through the access point of another customer.
Also, personal experience: My own ISP (in Germany) experimented with some similar stuff a few years ago: They mandated use of their own home routers where only they had root access. At some point, they pushed an OTA update that made the router announce a second Wifi network in addition to the customer's. This was meant as a public hotspot that people walking down the street could connect to after installing an app from the ISP and buying a ticket.
The customer that "owned" the router wasn't charged for that traffic and the hotspot was isolated from the LAN (or at least the ISP promised that), but it still felt intrusive to just repurpose a device sitting in my living room as "public" infrastructure.
(The ISP initially wanted to do this on an "opt-out" basis, which caused a public uproar thankfully. I think eventually they switched to opt-in and then scrapped the idea entirely.)
> Also, personal experience: My own ISP (in Germany) experimented with some similar stuff a few years ago: They mandated use of their own home routers where only they had root access. At some point, they pushed an OTA update that made the router announce a second Wifi network in addition to the customer's. This was meant as a public hotspot that people walking down the street could connect to after installing an app from the ISP and buying a ticket.
Not sure if you're referring to Vodafone, but Vodafone Germany definitely does this. You can opt out of allowing public access via your personal router, but this opts you out of being able to use other people's routers in the same manner.
The ISP named Free in France also did this a while ago.
It was fairly well implemented I think: separated from your network, bandwidth was limited (to avoid impacting the host), you could opt-out (which meant opting out of using the guest network), joining the wifi was automatic if you had a cellphone with the same ISP and it was the same "guest" network for all routers so in big cities, you could rely only on this to access Internet.
It was stopped a few years ago when they deemed cellular network was reliable enough to not need the guest network.
If it had Ethernet ports I'd be tempted to just use my own wifi router and put the ISP's Trojan horse in a Faraday cage. All ISP-controlled hardware should be treated as just another untrusted WAN hop.
When I signed up with them, they were actually trying to withold access to the config web UI from customers and then charge extra just to enable Wifi. My response was exactly that - "fuck that" and put my own router in front of theirs.
(That was years before the other incident - since then they had dropped that idea and "generously" given customers access to the config UI)
Also, personal experience: My own ISP (in Germany) experimented with some similar stuff a few years ago: They mandated use of their own home routers where only they had root access. At some point, they pushed an OTA update that made the router announce a second Wifi network in addition to the customer's. This was meant as a public hotspot that people walking down the street could connect to after installing an app from the ISP and buying a ticket.
The customer that "owned" the router wasn't charged for that traffic and the hotspot was isolated from the LAN (or at least the ISP promised that), but it still felt intrusive to just repurpose a device sitting in my living room as "public" infrastructure.
(The ISP initially wanted to do this on an "opt-out" basis, which caused a public uproar thankfully. I think eventually they switched to opt-in and then scrapped the idea entirely.)