Six years ago, I nearly got my ISP to upgrade our fibre connection to 1Gbps. As I said at the time: This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years. What's the point of Gigabit broadband? Well, it's a few years later and Virgin Media have just given me their Gig1 package for £30 per month. Nice! With all the inflation related price rises, it's great to …
ok, I was probably biased by all the slow routers I had, but to my defense even the openwrt wiki mentions that SQM might not be useful with routers that have a slow CPU:
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm
I don’t know what were your companies consumer base, but where I live basically everyone has the cheapest old consumer routers that are on the very limits of the openwrt hardware requirements.
The openwrt docs reference this post: forum.openwrt.org/t/so-you-have-500mbps-1gbps-fiber-and-need-a-router-read-this-first/90305
They talk about a router from 2009 not being able to handle CPU-only SQM on a gigabit internet connection.
If you have a gigabit internet connection you don’t need SQM.