This reminds me of the Hacker Crackdown - the event that kicks it all off is related to telco systems that can reboot themselves in a couple seconds if they detect a problem.
Anyway, it sucks to think that anyone’s internet would be so shaky that it would be worth buying a device to automatically reboot their router. I believe it, but it sucks.
I designed some such devices as expedient workarounds.
They can be bloody useful. Sometimes the cause of a machine seizing cannot be readily discovered. Then you need to restart it remotely.
I have a way to reset, power down and power up ordinary ATX motherboards via a pair of optocouplers.
Back in the good old days of computers, when they were expected to work properly, I built a test box with a 555 timer and an opto-relay that would power-cycle our company’s VMEbus computers repeatedly for a knob-settable amount of ‘off’ time, to help me debug startup issues.
No one seems to do that any more.
I had an ISP that provoked me to set a cron job on my router many years ago. Despite the numerous complaints I have with my current provider, my router only goes down if there’s a power outage. I use my own though, and not an ISP provided one.
And that’s why the services of people like you and I are in demand. 
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