ATT Fiber vs Spectrum
ATT Fiber vs Spectrum
Hi all, just getting into home labbing the past few months. I have a small cluster of Proxmox machines running many of the usual services.
Currently running a 350x10 Spectrum cable internet connection. This is working just fine and has been shockingly stable for five years. It also keeps a very sticky public IPv4 address that has been perfect for self hosting and a cloudflare tunnel. It’s a modem only that goes into an OPNsense VM.
Upload is obviously a bottleneck that has become frustrating. AT&T Fiber came through the neighborhood a few months ago and are offering a 300x300 FTTH with no installation, fees, caps, contracts etc for less than the Spectrum connection. I’d love to jump on it but have read in a few places that they sometimes use CGNAT, the gateways don’t behave well in passthrough mode, mess with traffic, block ports, etc.
I guess the question is then, what are people’s experience with ATT fiber and homelabbing? Is there anyone who won’t lie about it that I could call before install? In SC if it matters. Thanks!
I tried AT&T fiber for a month, but it's a never-ending arms race between their absolute piece of shit gateway and the new methods people develop to bypass it. In the end I went back to the awful 15mbps upload of cable I could use with my own equipment, over the symmetrical gigabit fiber with a mandatory gateway (with a rental fee) which I'd only use in "passthrough mode" that still runs every packet through a state table that maxes out at 8000 entries. I was paying rent for a device whose only purpose was to authenticate to their network and throttle my traffic.
Still bitter about it, clearly lol. I'd pay 4x as much if I could just get an ONT.
If you don't mind the state table and rental fee things, you'll probably be fine. Just be sure to run everything behind the gateway behind your own firewall, since AT&T can log into it and change whatever they want any time.
1In Alabama. Don’t have CGNAT. The gateway does ip Passthrough fine, the newer BGW320 505 anyway. If you do ip Passthrough to your own router there won’t be any ports that will be blocked.
While rare, sometimes att will remotely update it and you may need to reconfigure ip Passthrough again. If you choose not to use ip Passthrough, port forwarding works fine it’s just awkwardly implemented.
I thought I would hate att but the service has been way more stellar than I thought. However the customer service is god awful, too many policies road block quality service.
In my setup I often get more bandwidth than I pay for. So much so I downgraded to 300/300 and usually see 400ish+ sometimes.
1AT&T fiber ONTs don’t have a bridge mode, so adding a separate router would give double NAT
That being said, just use the ONT/router as the default gateway, and could use it for dns/dhcp or run your own instead. Can run all your own infrastructure and just disable services on the AT&T router that you want to run yourself. Disable WiFi and use your own access points, etc.
For accessing your services remotely, use a vpn like tailscale or zerotier, or set up cloudflare tunnels for publicly accessible services.
Fiber is better than copper, and the extra upload is absolutely worth it.
1It's always a good idea to jump on free installation for fiber. It adds value to your home. It also gives you bargaining power when ATT raises the rates. You can call Spectrum and play ATT against each other.
As others mentioned in comments ONT connection is what you want.
Old article, but still relevant for ONT explanation: https://www.groundedreason.com/use-router-fios-internet/
1I switched to ATT Fiber around a year ago (from Spectrum) and I've had no issues thus far. Their provided gateway doesn't properly bridge though, creating a double NAT situation. I worked around this by getting my own ONT and then writing the data from the old gateway to it (S/N, ONT ID, etc.). As for CGNAT, my network has a public facing IP, not a CGNAT'd one.
If you're curious about using your own ONT, here's the guide I used (I believe you'll need a BGW320 originally to use this): https://docs.google.com/document/d/13gucfDOf8X9ptkj5BOg12V0xcqqDZDnvROJpW5CIpJ4/view
1I would jump at the better speed for less money.
Depending on what you need the IP for, you can bypass CGNAT with DDNS and other methods reliably and easily.
Not enough for a mid-level office/enterprise, but sufficient for everything below. Barring extreme homelabers.
1I've had AT&T Fiber in two different cities 360 miles apart and neither location had CGNAT. The AT&T Gateway isn't the greatest, but it can hand off the WAN IP to your own router, but you're still confined to the AT&T Gateway's tiny NAT table. The extra upload speed is no joke. I also Work from home and I can upload files to the company Google Drive faster than I can when I visit an office. You can ask AT&T for static IPs still I believe, but at my last place the Dynamic IP didn't change in 4 years.
The service has been quite reliable. I have had one 2 hour outage after a windstorm in six months. I live in an older neighborhood where telecom and electric are all above ground in the alley.
1Look into a business account with ATT, which gives the added benefit of a fixed IP.
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