How to Use Own Router with AT&T Fiber

AT&T follows the same bizarre rules that most internet providers seem to follow: they only want you to play with their toys. Many excuses exist, like security or assisting you during the dreaded customer support call, but the fact of the matter is that most third-party routers are just better than that provided by the provider themselves.

Netgear, Linksys, TP-Link, and so on, all have offerings that can make better use of your fiber broadband you’re shelling out for with better Wi-Fi signals across the house or if you live in an apartment building, helping cut through the noise that multiple devices can cause in one place.

So it’s no coincidence that AT&T has a massive hill to overcome if you want to use your own router. Getting out of their ecosystem and into your own just means that they can’t upsell you on repeaters or a newer router towards the end of your current contract.

But fear not, as help is at hand and we’ll help you break the shackles of the dreaded broadband provider… sort of.

See, AT&T still require the router to be in the lineup of devices to act as the gateway for your connection – pretty much to determine whether you’re a legitimate customer – and you’ll need to keep it on at all times as we daisy chain routers together in this attempt at getting you a better overall experience.

Find your router’s IP

Routers across the world all deal with similar strings of IP addresses. For those not sure, an IP address is the unique set of numbers that your connection places onto each device that connects to it, literally like an address, and is used as an identity for the device when communicating with the router.

Before we do anything remotely more complex than guessing, an AT&T router will usually use one of two defaults: 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.254. This will bring you to the administration page for the router.

If you’ve never really changed any settings on your router, the login will be admin and then your modem should have a sticker or leaflet included with it that gives you the right login under “system password” or “device access code”. This password could also be blank or admin.

However, if you’ve already changed them at some point, you’ll want to type in your credentials.

We only have access to a PC at the time of writing, so for Mac devices, we’ll have no images.

You will now have the IP address and be able to head into AT&T’s router options.

You might find one mode works, while the other doesn’t here. It’s a bit of a shot in the dark, but to simply put it: ensure your AT&T Modem is only hosting the router you want to use in its Ethernet ports. Everything else is going to go into your third-party router, so there’s no need for it other than this.

Dynamic Mode will assign an IP to everything that connects, while Static is for a singular device. Folk online have issues with each, so it’s really dependent on what you can get working. If anything goes wrong, that’ll be one thing you want to change.