I'm kinda amazed, but here goes.

My previous home network was using AT&T U-verse's proprietary VDSL2 thing for 15Mbps down/1.5MBps up hooked to my home network with an Apple Airport Extreme. It turned out that I could save myself some serious money by killing my POTS line and instead getting AT&T's VoIP service.

Installer #1 reinforced my general impression of AT&T. Arrived at 11:30am for a "9-10am" appointment. Came without the necessary cables or parts. Yammered on for an hour before leaving. So I rescheduled.

Installer #2 arrived today at 9:42am for the same time slot. 90 minutes later, I now have a new gateway box (now with an internal backup battery). I blew another hour getting it properly configured (i.e., disable all firewall packet filtering crap, put it in "passthrough" mode, etc.) and rejiggering my Airport Extreme configuration.

Now, though, everything works, like better than it ever did beforehand. I can finally ssh from the outside world to my desktop at home. Previously, I was stuck with a "double NAT" configuration that totally prevented this from working, but now it's good. I'm not 100% sure if it's just a new feature ("IP passthrough") or if it's that I finally found decent advice to configure everything. (Note that that advice incorrectly suggests using non-private IP addresses for your private NAT. Otherwise, it tells you to do things that seem to work.)

I still want to get myself AT&T "GigaPower", but I'm stuck on their privacy violation engine. Also, the Rice IT guys were like "oh no, don't get it, it totally doesn't work yet". I can wait.

Regular everything is working, but YouTube is totally failing on my desktop, but working perfectly fine from my phone. Whee!

Good to hear you've gotten their modem into bridge mode, should make things much easier. Glad my provider that uses VDSL2 requires the setup to be in bridge mode. They tend to provide very specific router advice too, for the ones known to be able to handle the speed their connection can offer. Though most of their customers are now on direct ethernet connections bridged over to the fibre network instead of VDSL2 being the bridge to the fibre.

Only downside, the VDSL2 modems they tend to use have some IPv6 bugs likely to not be fixed. It's why the IPv6 rollout attempt here was rocky, was difficult to test from home. Not sure if I'm going to seek to replace the modem, or just live with it till I leave this current place.

The modem's initial firewall configuration was set up to filter out all IPv6 traffic. I turned all that off, trying to make it as "dumb" as possible. Just give me the damn packets please.

If bridged = IP Passthrough, IPv6 etc should not even come into it.

That's the direction I'm moving in myself.

I'm still on a coax connection to my Fios ONT box, but at least I was able to replace their Actiontec router with a dumb MoCA adapter that had MoCA WAN capability.

I've since made the ethernet connections outside my house to the ONT (as per instructions from a helpful Fios installer), and as soon as I get around to running ethernet to a preferred router location inside my home, I'll be very pleased to have the router hooked up directly and eliminate one more piece of equipment.

We're pretty fortunate in these parts, in that cable internet connections are readily available with simple bridge modems. Here at The Pumpkin (our new house) we have 100/10 over DOCSIS 3.0 (CDN$75/month).

The VDSL stuff (over telco wiring) is a bit messier, but seems to also now be sorted out with plain bridging being a commonly available option.

For now at least.

Cheers

I'd love to get my ONT/router/all-in-one device into pass-through mode. I read on the internet that it's possible, but that you have to talk to the Telmex techs to get it done, and I'm just now getting comfortable enough with my Spanish to be able to handle that sort of thing over the phone.

I've done the bridge mode thing on Verizon's Actiontec router before. It's strangely difficult, and even when I had everything set up the way that every source told me to do it, I still seemed to have issues. That's why I went to such trouble to get that router out of the mix entirely.

I get why ISPs want to have complete control over the hardware they put in your house (easier/cheaper to provide support), but I'm glad I at least have the option to go my own way.

Comcast in Maryland sets the default to being a router with a firewall and secure wifi enabled. Given typical users, I like that approach. (Of course, every router also ships with a comcast wifi link that allows any comcast subscriber to use your router as a hotspot. Don't like that so much.)

A quick phone call can convert the router to a dumb pass-through modem; if you know how to ask, they reprogram it for you, no questions asked.

-jk

Comcast doesn't bother to take into account the density of some of their installs when doing this either. My apartment sees 5 full strength XFinitiWiFi access points, and about 5 more at lesser signal strength. Seems their little "have a snack and wine while socializing with neighbors" events has gotten a lot of people to sign up for their service in my apartment. Been making sure to post the flyer for the much better local Internet provider on the community board for those around me not interested in cable TV.

I accidentally joined one of these networks on my Mac, and it lead to a support call with Apple for a bit. iCloud can sync preferred WiFi networks (and passwords if needed via Keychain) between Macs and iOS devices. Discovered a design flaw in how this is handed on the Mac side.

If a Mac has two user accounts, with two different iCloud accounts in use, the preferred WiFi networks will end up merging between the two iCloud accounts. (I have two accounts for testing, usually for beta releases.) Due to the way it was implemented, it makes it difficult to remove a network. Signing back into the other account may restore the removed network, as iCloud for the second account sees it as missing from the machine and restores the network.

For about a month, I'd have a random chance of waking up to my iPhone on the XFinity network, displaying the portal page to sign in. My own router was suffering some power loss issues due to a failing UPS, and the phone would see my network disappear thus triggering a search for WiFi overnight.

The support case went all the way to Apple engineering, who was trying to track down a bug or some error that would hint at the issue. Took me enabling some real time logging on the laptop, and signing into the second account on the desktop to discover the design flaw.

In parallel to the efforts with Apple, I engaged Comcast support via Twitter. That was amusing. They missed me telling them that I wasn't a customer, and at some point rebooted someone else's router as a result.

Yeah, that tracks. Comcast support is, unsurprisingly, among the top three worst I've ever dealt with. It literally took 12 site visits to get them to come inside one of my client's buildings. They'd keep sending someone, the tech would measure the signal coming to the equipment outside, then leave because it was working fine. I contacted them through every channel I could think of, including twitter. Somehow I finally talked to a thinking human being and was able to get the message across that they needed to come inside. Ugh.

Follow-on from my AT&T Uverse "upgrade" to Uverse Voice:

Everything is now working fine. I have no idea why YouTube was acting wonky on my desktop, but rebooting it (which I had to do anyway, for a software upgrade) totally fixed the problem. I wouldn't be surprised if the new VDSL box was "learning" about my connection for the first day and was adjusting its buffering or whatever. (Or, that my computer had some learned model of buffering quick-start parameters which was suddenly all very, very wrong.)

Supposedly I get free voicemail as part of the deal, but at least for now I'm continuing to use my plain old home answering machine. Whatever benefit I'd get from worldwide access to my voicemail would be immediately lost by having to deal with the horror that is the AT&T app. These ratings tell a sad tale.

Sigh.

And here I am, with 384/192 kbps DSL service. I think that it is about $50 per month.

Stream Netflix? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

It's all about caching!

-jk