Berton never stated that it had anything to do with Internet to the WAN. Majority of Consumer and ISP leased Gateways have slow CPU's and not enough RAM. You will never see a sustained speed equal to 1gig. Majority of Gateway equipment and 10/100/1000 can do a burst up to maybe 950 and that is about it.

For Wifi, you need a adapter with multiple antennas. Those that do Wireless-ac use two antennas that allow up to 400 to 600 mbps. Wireless-n cards can do up to 150 mbps per antenna. Sustained will never be high enough to ever get what the ISP's are marketing as Gig Speed.

Consumers are getting sucked in thinking that the gateway that the providers give out are powerful enough to actually give you what an Enterprise or Small Business router will do.

As for 20 years ago, dial up used software to manage CRC and 33.6k. The actual device was just a dumb device until you installed software for it to run.

Cable is not faster than what is being used. WAN does not mean going outside of your control. It can also be used to interconnect multiple routers on a large complex for buildings to have their own private network.