[conspire] (forw) Re: [sf-lug] Using Linux with AT&T internet service.

[Rick Moen]

Could be useful.  (I should add that, if you actually _wish_ to run
AT&T's proprietary "Smart Home Manager", app-store versions are
available for your walled-garden smartphone, too.  Also, to elaborate on
a passing comment, something called "AT&T U-Verse" still exists, but the
term has been reassigned to a _television_ service product line.  The
former Internet product line of that name was junked in 2016.)

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2023 19:41:33 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: sf-lug at linuxmafia.com
Subject: Re: [sf-lug] Using Linux with AT&T internet service.
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Robert Johnson (emailbox6357 at gmail.com):

> I spoke to an AT&T rep yesterday, and it's their (fiber optic?) 1 Gig home
> internet.

Ah, that answers the first thing I was going to ask.

AT&T has three tiers of residential service currently, depending on
cable/wiring transport:

1.  100% fibre-optic network plans called Internet 300, 500, 1000, 2000,
5000: generic collective brand name "AT&T Fiber Internet".  That's what
the salescritter was salivating over selling you.  The numbers are 
(in all of these tiers) the theoretical, but probably never approached,
maximum raw throughput inbound in Mbps.

2.  hybrid fibre/copper network plans called Internet 25, 50, 100:
generic collective brand name "AT&T Internet".

3.  copper VDSL2 plans called Internet 25, 50, 100: generic collective
brand name "AT&T Internet".  This is kinda-sorta the modern inheritor
of the old AT&T U-verse ADSL2+ marketing concept.  U-verse is gone with
the dodo, and AT&T is trying to shuck all *DSL as quickly as it can.

There is also AT&T Business Fiber.



> I did a search on [AT&T's] website and they don't seem to have much to
> do with anything but Win and Apple.

Yes, that's what you find.  As has been in the case 99.9% of the time
with ISPs over the past 30 years, it's pretty much a crock.  A flimsy 
untruth.

_After_ the guy with the utility belt scratches his head a few times,
declares that your fibre line is ready, and leaves, at some point you
get a plastic doohickey to connect it to, called an Arris model BGW320.
Except, given that this is AT&T, they will probably have had it
misleadingly labelled as AT&T BGW320.

This is, on the fibre-optic cable (utility-facing) side, an ONT, which
is an Optical Network Terminal.  Which, y'know, sends and receives
digital-coded light impulses and bidirectionally turns them into
electrical signals usable by networks.  On the customer-facing side,
it's a router and WAP (wireless access point).   All of this comprises
what Comcast, etc. call a "gateway box", with all those functions mushed
together into a (usually pretty bad) combined-function box.  Looks like 
there's about $130 new on Amazon.  

I'm cynically guessing AT&T will want to _rent_ one to the customer for, 
say, $20/month, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, getting back to AT&T customer setup.  You look at AT&T's
instructions and it says, "Welcome, happy customer.  Plug in your
spanking new AT&T BGW320.  Now, download Smart Home Manager."  You 
dutifully bob around on their Web site, and you find click-clicky
proprietary packages for MacOS and for Win32.

Curses!  Foiled!  Stymied at the very beginning, because you absolutely
need Smart Home Manager -- and inability to run it is a blocker.

Except, no.  That's a crock.  The Arris model BGW320 has a built-in
administrative Web interface trivially reached from any computer capable
of running a Web browser.  Sonic.net details this, among other places.
https://help.sonic.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500000066642-ARRIS-BGW320

If you ever need to _replace_ your Arris, I mean AT&T BGW320, you'll 
be told the same bullhockey: "Download Smart Home Manager."  Why? 
Because it's been maximally droolproofed for end-users; therefore they
want to push customers to it, even though it's extraneous.

Aside from that, there's absolutely nothing I can see about the service
that requires a particular OS, though doubtless they would be thrilled
to sell you product bundles including, say, antivirus software.

Final point:  As I mentioned, "gateway boxes" sold/rented by ISPs are 
pretty reliably dreadful, and, in particular, prone to getting
overloaded and slow or dysfunctional because they are called to do too
much using shamefully little CPU and RAM.  In the case of something like
the Arris BGW320, the only part of the combo that AT&T could even be
easily _aware_ of you replacing is the part that faces it, the ONT.
And, guess what?  Suppose just for the sake of discussion you already
have a best-of-breed WAP/router, and see no reason to stop using it.
Can you?

Yes.  As with essentially all such combo boxes, you can login to the
admin WebUI and find a little toggle to enable "passthrough mode".  
This causes it to do the utility-facing minimum thing, in this case,
be an ONT, and do nothing else.  The Arris would then send ethernet
frames out from its assigned IP address, on its 1000Base-T ethernet
port.  You use an ethernet patch cable to connect to your WAP/gateway's
ethernet port.  You do whatever's required (if anything) make the latter
find its Internet gateway.  And you are done.  Finis.  Mix a martini.

And, even if the Arris BGW320 ONT/router/WAP is only barely tolerable
in default mode (as is often true), maybe it'll be just fine being just
an ONT, and will be happy thinking ONT thoughts and singing ONT songs.

Notice that nothing about this is OS-specific at all.  


But, as I mentioned, this "You must use only these operating systems" 
con-job has been an irritant all through the history of Internet Service
Providers, and in just about all cases proves upon examination to mean
"We want to you to do $THING because it's convenient to us, but no, that
isn't actually necessary at all.  We just lie and mislead in our
documentation, and the scripts that our tech support people are required
to read from."


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----- End forwarded message -----