[TriLUG] Residential IPv4 address stability, etc. (AT&T vs. Google Fiber)

[David Burton via TriLUG]

Thank you, everybody, for the information and advice!


I first tried T-Mobile, but ended up with AT&T Fiber. It's now working
well, but I had to get over some bumps in the road.


*Spectrum:*

Before switching from Spectrum, I called and gave them one last opportunity
to keep my business. I told them both Google and AT&T have run fiber to my
curb, and both are cheaper and much faster than Spectrum, and I was
planning to switch, unless they could give me a better deal, and I asked
for the Retention Department.

They told me I already had the best rate they could give me, and the
Retention Department no longer exists. Oh, well.

After the AT&T service was up and running, I called Spectrum and cancelled
my service. They immediately transferred me to the Retention Department.

I told the guy that I'd been told that his department no longer exists. He
said it is sometimes now called Customer Solutions (I think that was the
name).

He was very friendly. He offered me 500 mbps for $40 / month, which is
seven times the speed that I was getting, and less than half the price that
I was paying.

I told him it was too late. Considering that AT&T had five different men
come to my house to get my equipment installed, and expended two long fiber
cables, they won't break even on me for several years, at least, so I'm not
going to cancel their service to save a few bucks, unless they treat me
very badly.

And I really don't like the fact that Spectrum brazenly lied to me.


*T-Mobile:*

T-Mobile *home* internet has a locked-down, unconfigurable gateway, which
is completely unusable if you need to host a web server or similar.

But for exactly the same $50 price you can get their *business* internet,
which is much better. (You'll have to give them a business dba name.)
Their business internet service comes with a vastly superior gateway, and,
with it, they also give you the option of a static IP for an extra $3/month.

Plus, as a bonus, with their business internet service you get your
very own T-Mobile "Account Executive," including his personal mobile phone
number, and his email address!!! You can call him, and he'll answer his
phone, and remember you!!! It is an absolutely unheard of level of service,
in the internet business.

And, as another bonus, they don't have to dig up your yard (nor your
neighbor's yard).

Alas, though I'm less than a mile from their tower, and their coverage map
shows great coverage here, my house is surrounded by many tall trees, and
the signal quality just wasn't good enough. With an outdoor antenna, I
could have matched Spectrum's 70 mbps performance, but the gateway's
external antenna connectors are non-functional (apparently intended for a
different band, used by some other provider).

If I'd had good line-of-sight to their tower, I'd have stuck with T-Mobile.


*Google:*

Google was my fallback plan, if AT&T didn't work out. But I prefer to avoid
them, because of their censorship, their unethical business practices, etc.

This is not me:
<https://sealevel.info/i_for_one_welcome_our_new_google_overlords2.jpg>


*AT&T:*

AT&T has an access port in my front yard. So I thought it would be a short
fiber run to the house. Alas, they couldn't make that one work, so they
ended up running a long fiber cable from the other direction, and they had
to tear up two yards, and bore under two driveways, to do it. *(Sorry about
that, neighbor!)*

But they got it done, they didn't cut anyone else's wires or pipes, and the
connection is fast and reliable (and symmetrical, and about 20% faster than
advertised).

However, I'm very *unimpressed* with AT&T's HUMAX BGW320-500 gateway. That
piece of junk wasted a *lot* of my time.

It *appears* to support port forwarding, and it *appears* to have a pretty
comprehensive feature set. But do not make the mistake of trying to *use*
those features.

The first minor issue I encountered was that it wouldn't let me configure
my LAN to use 10.0.0.* (which is what I've always used). It does support
either 192.168.*.* or 172.16...*, but for no obvious reason it does not
support 10.*anything*.

So, before switching from my rock-solid Netgear R6400 router and my
rock-solid Motorola/Arris SB6121 cablemodem to AT&Ts' new BGW320-500
gateway, I first changed my old router to use 172.16.0.*, for compatibility
with the new gateway. Not a big deal, but I had to change a few static IPs,
etc.

Then, after some "online learning," I configured the new gateway's various
ports to forward as required by the various things on my network. I
unplugged the old Netgear router & cablemodem, plugged up the new gateway,
and thought I was almost done. But the fun was just beginning.

For some reason, my printer wouldn't connect to the new gateway's WiFi, but
I just ran an ethernet cable to it. Again, not a big deal.

At that point, everything *sort* *of* worked. But my web server was very
slow, and sometimes things would time out, when accessing it. In Chrome,
F12 debugging showed highly variable file load times, from javascript, of
anywhere from 1/2 second to many seconds. Both local files and files loaded
from other domains, like gstatic.com, were often horribly slow. Some
complex pages, which had previously loaded in a second or two at most, now
sometimes took several minutes to load, or timed-out.

At first I thought the problem was just with accessing my server on my own
LAN, and I guessed that the gateway was not properly handling the passing
of traffic between machines on my LAN, when addressed using the external IP
address. (I'd seen that issue once, long ago, on an inferior router.) So in
Windows I configured a "hosts" file, to direct local traffic to the right
machine on the LAN, for my websites' domains.

But that did no good, and after checking from an outside connection I
realized that outside connections to my web sites were also sluggish.

I thought it might be DNS issues. The stupid BGW320-500 wouldn't let me
override the AT&T nameservers, so I configured them in Windows to 8.8.8.8
and 1.1.1.1 on the Windows machine, and in Linux I overrode the nameservers
in /etc/resolv.conf (which required adding "rc-manager=unmanaged" in
/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf). But that did no good, either.

To my surprise, when I ran nmtui on my Linux web server I found two br0
interfaces defined: one for 172.16.0.* and one for the old 10.0.0.*. *Eureka!
*That's got to be it, I thought!  But when I deleted the obsolete one (for
10.0.0.*), it did no good.

Finally, I gave up. I dusted off my old Netgear R6400 router, disabled WiFi
in the stupid BGW320-500, configured it for "passthrough," plugged up the
Netgear router between the BGW320-500 and my server, and ~ *voila! ~ *all
is now well with the world.  (Note: when you configure passthrough on the
BGW320-500, do *not* disable the DHCP server in the gateway!)

The bottom line, as near as I can tell, is that port forwarding on my
BGW320-500 gateway simply doesn't work right.

Dave


On Wed, Sep 27, 2023 at 5:39 PM Javier Henderson <javier at kjsl.com> wrote:

>
>
> > On Sep 14, 2023, at 15:25, David Burton via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
> wrote:
> >
> > I'm looking for some advice.
> >
> > Can anyone who has either AT&T fiber or Google fiber please tell me about
> > how long your IPv4 assignments typically last?
>
> I’ve had AT&T Fiber since August 2018 and my IPv4 (single address) and
> IPv6 (I got a /64) haven’t changed since. AT&T did replace the CPE about a
> year ago, and I replaced my border router a couple times since the service
> was installed, and having new MAC addresses didn’t cause getting a new set
> of addresses.
>
> -jav
>
>