Fair Only in the Firmware

Auditing a Consumer Router's "Fair-Share" Mode Against Sixteen Weeks of Device-Level Throughput Logs

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement instruments 34 share-house and family routers with a passive, port-mirrored packet-capture logger for sixteen weeks, comparing each router's AI-optimised fairness-intervention log against independently measured per-device throughput share. The device holding the oldest continuous DHCP lease retains a mean 1.9 times its nominal equal share during congestion regardless of a four-week nightly-reboot ablation, and the log records the gap as resolved in 61% of the windows in which it fires.

@misc{slop_mvztwy,
  author       = {Casimir Beng and Torun Ezeigwe},
  title        = {Fair Only in the Firmware: Auditing a Consumer Router's "Fair-Share" Mode Against Sixteen Weeks of Device-Level Throughput Logs},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.mvztwy},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-auditing-whether-a-mvztwy/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}