AT&T UVerse required the use of their (massive) Residential Gateway when I was their customer. I worked around this by turning off their routing features (DMZ Mode) and putting an OpenWRT router next in line. It had a wonderful quirk wherein the DHCP lease between the RG and my router was only for an hour, and my router took actual time to reestablish the lease. This led to my internet dropping every hour on the hour for around a year before I switched to a new ISP which had no issue with me using my own equipment.
I’m now on Google Fiber, which requires me to jump through a few hoops to get my equipment running at top speed, but I’m able to do so fairly easily by using a bespoke pfSense router. I’m in the process of replacing my router-as-AP with a Ubiquiti due to it failing for no explainable reason at least once a day, and not having received an update in nearly two years.
Being your own sysadmin is not my favorite thing. By analogy: I do not enjoy driving, but I enjoy being a passenger even less.
Apropos of nothing, but does anyone know why my pfSense box would be talking to the internet at 1Gb, but to my internal network at only 100Mb? It would be nice to be able to use all of my bandwidth, even if 100Mb has rarely been a bottleneck.
