Last Updated on December 6, 2020 by David Both
The migration to AT&T fiber is now complete and everything went very well. Of course that is not to say it was problem-free.
I have never been a fan of AT&T but my previous provider has been unable to resolve issues with the network just dropping out and the modem/router rebooting at frequent and inopportune times. But the speed of fiber and the fact that it is symmetric with upload and download speeds at 1Gb rather than uploads being so much slower as wih my old provider, and the fact that it is significantly less expensive, I decided to switch.
I wanted to go with residential service which is much less expensive but I had some concerns about needing static IP addresses and with issues I have seen with blocked ports like 25 for email. I run my own web and email servers so that was important to me. After a chat session with a fairly knowledgeable rep and talking with a sales person on the phone, they both said that the static IP addresses were not a problem and that the installation tech could help set that up as well as deal with blocked ports.
They were right. Which was a surprise to me.
Scott, the installation tech called me the morning of the installation to let me know he was on the way and he was delayed only slightly due to traffic. We discussed my needs for a few minutes and he assured me that we could do exactly what I needed. As a gamer, he was very knowledgeable and understood what I wanted and why.
After doing the physical installation of running the fiber from the street to my home office, we worked together to install the modem/router in my desired location and get it and the ONT plugged into a UPS, cabled together, and connected to the fiber. I would not let him into the narrow space available to do that so we worked together on it.
He installed updates to the Arris modem/router and we were ready to go. He showed me on his hand-held tester that the rates were both within a decimal point of 1Gb. We easily got the static IP addresses configured on the router.
I then reconfigured my own internal router. We did have some issues with blocked ports. Although I could browse the web and SSH to remote hosts, nothing was able to initiate connections to my router/firewall. After calling around to various support systems inside AT&T, Scott and I figured out how to unblock the needed ports and everything was working fine.
I did have some issues with speeds, but those problems were with my own older Linux computer that I was using for my router/firewall. I moved the hard drive from that machine to a newer one, installed the needed network adapters, made a few configuration changes and all is now well.
It just took longer than I expected but everything seems to be working very well now. Thanks for your patience and I hope you were not inconvenienced by the outages during this time.
