Just upgraded to AT&T Fiber today. I was skeptical after their U-VERSE marketing, but this is actual fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service. From the central office, it hits a 64-port fiber hub not far from my house and one of those ports are mine. 😈

I’m not a huge fan of having to use someone else’s wireless AP and router. I’ve always been a bring-your-own-equipment kind of guy. Plus, I already have a pretty decent setup with my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X, Dell PowerConnect, and Ubiquiti UniFi AP.

With my AT&T service, I get a NOKIA BGW320-500 fiber modem. She’s pretty and actually has a decent UI with a lot of configurable options you don’t generally get to see with modems like the Motorola MB8611 — at least once the ISP gets a hold of it.

Anyway, I found this helpful forum post about using the BGW320-500 in pass-through mode so you can use your own equipment.

Setup Pass-through Mode on the BGW320

1. Before getting started, make sure you have the Smart Home Manager app they get you to setup when you get fiber installed. If you don’t have it, you can use the QR code on the back of your modem or visit this site.
2. Log into the modem’s web interface. (If you’re on the same network, there is no authentication.)
3. Go to Packet Filter under the Firewall tab and click on “Disable Packet Filters” button to disable iptables. Click on the “Save” button to save changes.
4. Go to Advanced Firewall under the same tab and set everything to Off. Click on the “Save” button to save changes.
5. Go to IP Passthrough under the same tab.
   1. Select the Passthrough option of Allocation Mode. (Do not enter a Default Server Internal Address.)
   2. Select DHCPS-Fixed option of Passthrough Mode.
   3. Enter your router’s MAC address in the Manual Entry field. For this step, you’ll need to know the MAC address of the specific port you’ll be using. I included a walk-through for my EdgeRouter X below.
   4. Click on the “Save” Button to save changes.
6. Go to Wi-Fi under the Home Network tab to disable your wireless networks.
   1. Set 2.4GHz to Off — this will turn off both your home and guest 2.4GHz networks.
   2. Set 5GHz to Off — same as above.
   3. Click on the “Save” button to save changes.
7. Your wireless networks will be immediately turned off after the previous step, but we still need to restart the modem. Use the Smart Home Manager app to send the restart signal and allow it go down gracefully — you can just unplug it, I suppose.

Getting MAC addresses of ports on EdgeRouter X

If you have a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X, you aren’t able to get the MAC addresses of the ports directly from the EdgeOS GUI, unfortunately. You can use either the CLI built into the GUI or use an SSH client like PuTTY on Windows or Terminal on Mac. (The login will be the same as your web GUI credentials.

All you have to do is type this command and hit enter:

show interfaces ethernet detail