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Comment by kindatrue | Hacker News Reader

That's one of the downsides of having a fiber connection, like AT&T - they don't allow 3rd party ones.

Fiber doesn't change the story from a technical point of view, 3rd party routers work fine and even if you just go first party there is no reason it has to be rent only (the boxes aren't expensive enough to justify the fees). If they tell you different then they are flat out lying.

I proxy only 802.1x traffic to and from from the AT&T modem and spoof my external MAC as the AT&T MAC. The AT&T router is not in the data path nor can it make any other connection beyond the 802.1x traffic (I have no IP on it's port to act as a gateway). Been working fine for over a year, performance is far better than when the data was running through their router even after disabling everything I could find.

Also there is a lot of hidden config on that router, for instance when Cloudflare announced 1.1.1.1 it wasn't reachable from my AT&T connection. Coincidentally that was the same week I swapped to my own router and when I did instantly 1.1.1.1 worked. Swapped back it didn't. So somewhere in there there were IPs and config that weren't showing in the user interface. They fixed the 1.1.1.1 issue in their routers about a month later.

True for the router, but some/all fiber service also requires an Optical Network Terminal (sometimes in your dwelling, sometimes outside). That belongs to the ISP and cannot be replaced with your own unit AFAIK.

There's no rental fee, but if it fails, you'll have to deal with the ISP to repair your service.

I think most people are referring to the modem/router combined, not just the modem. It is potentially a problem having the end customer replace the fibre ONT, as (X)GPON can be very sensitive and you could take out the whole fibre split for 32-128 customers if it starts playing up.

The ONT is a separate box and AT&T does not charge a rental fee for it so I don't think that's what's being referred to in this post about renting and routers.

That being said while on the topic yes you usually need a particular ONT for compatibility but there is no reason it would need to be a perpetual rent model or have the ISP logo on it. As for multiple connections being on a single shared line sure, that's how cable modems have operated for years without issue with consumer choice.

Verizon Fios allows it, AFAIK. The fiber terminates inside the house and converts to coax. Apparently there's an ethernet port on the fiber modem and you can skip the coax entirely if you just need ethernet.

If only AT&T did it that way. Instead, the fiber terminates at an ONT, which has an ethernet port and that connects to their router.

AT&T's network uses 802.1x authentication and the client certs are burned into ROM on the router.

The router has a crappy passthru mode where it gives your own device the external IP and sends any traffic to it, but under the hood it maintains its own (rather small capacity) NAT table for all the traffic. There's not a real bridge mode.

Some more technically inclined folks have come up with solutions like a proxy that just forwards 802.1x traffic to the router so it can respond, or rooting the AT&T box and pulling the certs out of ROM so you can use them to auth on your own network device.

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