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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

The "purchase your own router" argument goes out the window on a GPON or XGSPON network where the ISP provides the interface to the single strand of fiber, unless your ISP supports putting the ONT in what is effectively a layer 2 bridge mode, and then you provide your own router.

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Most allow some sort of bridge mode, and allow you to turn off the WiFi. Its not ideal, but it works well enough.

I have AT&T and they allow this, I have all traffic pointed to a custom Debian router with AdGuard, Firewalld, and OpenVPN. My phone and laptop then have OpenVPN and all traffic goes through my home network.

Its absolutly great. I see no ads and can watch streaming while I travel.

Yeah there was a bridge mode on the combo ONT + router we got during the previous food install, ~7 years ago. Worked fine.

The new place I recently moved to had an ONT unit in the house. Verizon sent us a router (cr1000a, godforsakenly DNS server but otherwise pretty good) but just unplugging it and plugging in our own world fine.

I'm double NAT here. Broadband refused to play ball with a DIY router, so the ISP one hands out a DHCP lease to a single machine and everything is on the other side. I'm told double NAT is very bad but overall it seems to work in practice.

I don’t want to self advertise but that has been made economical and self attainable since 2018 and we’ve got several communities around the world for guidance if you search for it. You’ll find the discord, telegram, forums, and blogs.

Yeah AT&T, being the #1 fiber provider in the USA, does not allow customers to supply their own fiber modem. You can put it in a sort of passthrough mode and use your own router though. But AT&T owns everything up to the ONT - and what exactly the "passthrough"/"bridge" mode does is not exactly fully verifiable.

> what exactly the "passthrough"/"bridge" mode does is not exactly fully verifiable.

How much does this matter? If your own router gets WAN IP addresses, it can route and firewall everything behind it.

AT&T's IP passthrough isn't a true layer 2 bridge. It's a NAT hack that allows the same public IP(v4) address to be used by the ONT/router and your router.

As such, you're limited to the resources of the ONT/router. For example, the number of hardware-accelerated flows is limited (~8000 I believe? I can't find a source right now).

They don’t allow it, but you can work around it fairly easily. You have to order a programmable fiber sfp from AliExpress. ATT doesn’t enforce 802.1x auth of the hardware in my area any more so all I had to do was clone my modems serial number to the sfp.

Thank you. I have a bone to chew with AT&T about not following the spirit of the Television Viewer Protection Act (TVPA), the law prohibits TV and broadband providers from charging rental or lease fees for modems when "the provider has not provided the equipment to the consumer; or the consumer has returned the equipment to the provider."

If you can provide a link to one that works for 5Gbps (symmetric, obviously) service I’d be much obliged.

https://pon.wiki/guides/masquerade-as-the-att-inc-bgw320-500...

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