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Comment by linux2647 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah this is how AT&T fiber forces you to pay for their router/WiFi combo box. The box contains an authentication certificate that is required for connecting to them. So frustrating

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According to the Obama era network neutrality rules, they weren’t allowed to discriminate against devices, but it was never enforced.

Hopefully that’ll become illegal and be enforced this time around.

Congress needs to pass a law so this stops being a political football under control of the Executive. You'll know if all the fuss about Net Neutrality was empty rhetoric if the Democrats don't propose any legislation in the next session. It's my controversial opinion that most of the debate around this issue at the policy level is political theatrics based more on partisanship and personalities than material differences in proposed and enforced law or administrative policy.

Definitely frustrating, but I've found it is worth the effort to bypass their router after authenticating.

This can be done by authenticating, then using a managed switch to swap the wall module from the VLAN with the at&t router, to a VLAN with another router spoofing the at&t router's MAC address.

I've been using this approach for years and have found it worth it as I do not trust the provided router. The downside is I have to spend five minutes going through this process every time there is a power outage, luckily there are only a few a year here so not much of an issue.

I just run my own router behind AT&T's router. Everything in the home connects to my own router. The loss of bandwidth is minimal, if any.

Are there any benefits to what you're doing over just doing that?

Edit: In my case, bandwidth drops from 970mbps at the ATT gateway to 930mbps at the internal router (2nd NAT). Latecy drop is higher, from 3-4ms at the ATT gateway to about 9-11ms, but most likely that is due to the Moca 2.5 that I've had to run between ATT and my internal router.

What you're describing is probably a "double NAT" situation, where both your ISP router and your own router are providing NAT. This can work fine albeit with some extra latency for simple use cases, but if you ever run any services on your home network that either rely on UPnP or port forwarding, it'll fall apart.

The best-of-both-worlds solution here is to have the outer ISP-provided router put your own router into some kind of DMZ, or use a bridge mode if the ISP router provides it. This basically turns your ISP-provided router into a dumber modem, and leaves all NAT and routing to your own hardware.

The AT&T router I have has an "IP Passthrough" mode which basically does a DMZ with my downstream router, but the router receives a public IP address. The AT&T router is essentially "invisible", but it takes up so much physical space, power, costs me $10/month, and is one more link in the fragile chain between me and the Internet.

Other comments here mention how to put the AT&T router behind a Ubiquiti gateway and proxy the authentication to it via some scripts. This reduces the reliance on the AT&T router for direct traffic, but you still need the router operational for those authentication handshakes.

Yes, you're correct, it is a double NAT.

The latency measured inside is around 9-11ms, so much higher than the 3-4ms measured at the ATT gateway.

I am not doing any port-forwarding, but I can definitely see it run into all kinds of problems, or require some configuration beyond my simple skills.

I'll investigate your comment: The best-of-both-worlds solution here is to have the outer ISP-provided router put your own router into some kind of DMZ, or use a bridge mode if the ISP router provides it. This basically turns your ISP-provided router into a dumber modem, and leaves all NAT and routing to your own hardware.

For me the loss of bandwidth was more severe. I gained about 200mbps on my 1gbps connection after bypassing (~650mbps -> ~850mbps). I also had a significant decrease in latency (~10%). Note, these improvements were even with the DMZ+ passthrough enabled on their router

The router they provided also had a tendency to both get 'congested' and drop connections.

Last, they have remote access to the provided router and do automatic, remote updates, which I am opposed to. I suspect they have other features they can abuse remotely. I want to control all my own hardware.

> every time there is a power outage, luckily there are only a few a year

loled - i mean sure its no biggy, but i dont even remember when i had to reprogram the ovens clock the last time. probably been a year or two since the last outage.

Unfortunately no longer the case with the new router that has a built in ONT and (according to forums, anyways) doesn’t use the same long-lived 802.11x mechanism :(

It sounds like it might worth purchasing a cheap UPS for your router.

Is this part of PPPoE, or can you put the router in bridge mode and then connect your own hardware?

Thankfully, AT&T doesn't run PPPoE on fiber (but hush before they get any bright ideas), but even if the 'residential gateway' is in bridge mode, it's performimg a useless function for users that don't need/want it to do NAT or WiFi or whatever it does for TV.

Ethernet on one side, and ethernet on the other, a couple ms between them.

I’ve neutered my AT&T fiber router with some Ubiquiti scripts:

https://community.ui.com/questions/INSTRUCTIONS-Bypass-ATT-F...

Still paying the monthly fee though

From my experience, you can set the firewall to pass-through, and connect from its LAN to the WAN of your own router.

A question for those in the know, can I not just take the SFP plug that plugs into my AT&T gateway/routr and plug it into an EdgeRouter with a SFP port?

I thought SFP is the one doing all fiber-to-ethernet conversion, so would that work?

You cannot. The router AT&T provides authenticates the connection. What you could do is run your own router with a copied MAC that forwards the auth and keep alive packets. Here is a guide for OpenWRT. https://pyther.net/2020/05/03/bypass-att-gateway-openwrt.htm...

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