What's new

AT&T 1gbps Fiber Router Advice

  • SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

bose301s

New Around Here
I just got AT&T 1gbps fiber installed on Saturday, their gateway is the Arris BGW210-700 which I feel has a relatively basic and crappy router built in. I have already disabled the built in WiFi radios so I can use my TP-Link EAP225s and it is working fine. What I am looking at is getting a router to use and how to disable the internal router on the Arris and just pass a plain connection to my router like I did with Spectrum.

I am debating between a pfSense box using one of the boxes off of Amazon, this or this or the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 12. My setup isn't super complicated, standard home network using windows PCs and a bunch of portable devices and cameras. Don't really need VPN or sub-LANs, just a single standard network. I am really just looking for what won't hurt the performance of my fiber and will give me the best experience. Any advice is appreciated, thanks.
 
I have the same setup from AT&T and set the BGW210 into IP Passthrough mode with my AC88U receiving the public WAN IP. I looked into pfSense as well but decided the time/effort wasn't worth it (for me). The line rate on the micro appliance's from the AT&T ONT is ~940Mbps from what I have read, and I'm getting in the neighborhood of 920 down / 940 up. Didn't seem like there would be much gain in my situation.
 
Yea, one of the biggest reasons to me is to be able to specify a different DNS provider and route my torrent client and Plex traffic through.
 
@Charlie Kukal and @bose301s - Most embedded SoC products should be able to route 2Gb/s aggregate (1GB up + down simultaneously), provided they have a proper full-duplex lane (architecture) between WAN and LAN interfaces, and NAT is hardware-accelerated. That's usually the case with most higher-end SOHO boxes these days (avoiding lower-end Broadcom/QCA el-cheapo all-in-ones, certain faux-enterprise routers, and any others where the WAN-LAN lane is less than full-duplex GbE, like the Ubiquiti ER-X).

The kicker is when you desire to run anything on the box that causes routing to be done in-software via CPU, such as OpenVPN, advanced QoS/queuing, or traffic analysis, etc. To maintain anywhere near 2Gb/s in that scenario, you're pretty much headed towards x86 or enterprise ASIC territory -- those Protectli and/or Qotom boxes off Amazon/AliExpress being one option, higher-power used/refurb PCs being another, and/or services routers / firewalls being another (Fortinet, Juniper SRX, Cisco ISR, Mikrotik CCR, etc.). Then you either run the vendor's OS or if its whiteox hardware throw on whatever *nix distro floats your boat (pfSense/OPNsense, Untangle, Sophos Community, OpenWRT, etc.) and away you go. For distros, rinse-lather-repeat until you find one whose core feature set and package offerings give you what you want.

That's the basic gist of things, in a nutshell. :)
 
Last edited:
OK, I do not know if I need anything that advanced, I just know I don't need WiFi built in as I am using the TP-Link APs.

If I do go Protectli is there any benefit to the 4 port, 4 core Celeron box over the 2 port, 2 core Celeron box?
 
No, you probably don't need anything as advanced as most of the stuff I mentioned; just wanted to paint the full picture for you. ;)

By going commodity x86 with something like a Protectli box, you'll have the option to run whatever firewall distro works best for you. If that's pfSense, then great. With Ubiquiti, it's probably best you stick with their EdgeOS firmware. You can try OpenWRT on a few models, but I don't really recommend it.

As far as port count goes, more ports just basically gives you more options for physically-segmenting LANs and/or bridging LAN ports, or doing multi-WAN load-balancing/failover across 2 or more ports. The more ports, the more options in that regard.
 
Ok, dumb question, if you use the 4 port model can you use the 3 ports as LAN ports basically using it like a switch where they're all on the same sub net?
 

Similar threads

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top