AT&T gigabit fiber in Cary, NC. AT&T finally rolled out fiber to us when Google Fiber was announced for the RTP area. However depending on where you live here in NC you might still just get crappy DSL! Some of the team prefers to live a bit further from the office instead of near a city, they get a beautiful view from their house but otherwise they suffer :)
I'm using the "switch trick" to remove AT&T's device entirely from the network; replaced it with a netgear R7000 running OpenWRT 19.07 snapshot.
The switch trick is where you put a switch between the PON ONT where the FTTH terminates and the NAT router you got from AT&T.
You plug in the AT&T NAT router device so it authenticates to the network, then you unplug it and switch the cable over to whatever device you like (as long as it's configured to spoof the AT&T device's MAC address).
The AT&T device gives me a "speed test" of over 800mbps, whereas the R7000 is limited to less since openwrt doesn't use any of the proprietary broadcom hardware acceleration.
However the R7000 still pushes over 400mbps, which is more than any real-world wifi device will do, so wifi is still the limiting factor.
Also, the R7000 running openwrt uses a plain linux network stack, which is more stable than AT&T's device. I don't have to worry about lost or reset TCP connections, or weird VPN issues -- the connection is rock solid.
If I really needed more speed I could swap out the R7000 with a more powerful (but hopefully still fanless) system.
I don't use the R7000 for wifi, instead I have an Amplifi HD device connected to it to do wifi. The Amplifi will push 400mbit in real world wifi conditions, which is nifty :)
AT&T gigabit fiber in Cary, NC. AT&T finally rolled out fiber to us when Google Fiber was announced for the RTP area. However depending on where you live here in NC you might still just get crappy DSL! Some of the team prefers to live a bit further from the office instead of near a city, they get a beautiful view from their house but otherwise they suffer :)
I'm using the "switch trick" to remove AT&T's device entirely from the network; replaced it with a netgear R7000 running OpenWRT 19.07 snapshot.
The switch trick is where you put a switch between the PON ONT where the FTTH terminates and the NAT router you got from AT&T.
You plug in the AT&T NAT router device so it authenticates to the network, then you unplug it and switch the cable over to whatever device you like (as long as it's configured to spoof the AT&T device's MAC address).
The AT&T device gives me a "speed test" of over 800mbps, whereas the R7000 is limited to less since openwrt doesn't use any of the proprietary broadcom hardware acceleration.
However the R7000 still pushes over 400mbps, which is more than any real-world wifi device will do, so wifi is still the limiting factor.
Also, the R7000 running openwrt uses a plain linux network stack, which is more stable than AT&T's device. I don't have to worry about lost or reset TCP connections, or weird VPN issues -- the connection is rock solid.
If I really needed more speed I could swap out the R7000 with a more powerful (but hopefully still fanless) system.
I don't use the R7000 for wifi, instead I have an Amplifi HD device connected to it to do wifi. The Amplifi will push 400mbit in real world wifi conditions, which is nifty :)
Here's the actual image!