Had two issues with old AT&T fiber modems this year
Thought I’d lay down what happened with two of my fiber modems this past year. They were the old style that looked like these BGW210s, although I can’t say for sure if that was what they were as both were removed by AT&T.
The first was at my house, and the issue was it straight up refused to factory reset and was being a butthole. Yes, that’s the correct terminology, being a butthole. I’ve been in IT since the 90’s and that’s right there in the manual. Butthole. “Do not subscribe to the equipment’s butthole.” It refused to play nice on Wi-Fi (acted slower than Glitch getting the second episode of the Amazing Digital Circus out,) and would slow down to a crawl for no apparent reason.
We managed to troubleshoot it on the phone to somewhat working level, but it was being really funky when attempting to do anything with the Wi-Fi (like being so slow you couldn’t load the admin page,) so it got swapped out for a beige abomination which has so far given me no trouble.
The second, which was also a black tower from 2018 if I remember correctly, started figuring out when I would leave my workplace and slow to a crawl. This was after the Nashville Electric Service had power off to our building for several hours and nobody informed me because they didn’t want to bother me post hospital. As such rather than me dancing around and shutting things off like a graceful little IT fairy, power was yoinked from the AT&T equipment (they said no UPSes. Not me,) and my guess is this is when the black fiber modem at work was injured.
It came back as something different, darkly disturbed and exceedingly annoying. Every day around 5:20am and 2:40pm the unit would slow down. Nothing too epic at first but connections would drop, lookups would fail, if you could connect to a speed test you were getting great results but quite often you would connect and be informed by the webpage you just loaded that there was no internet connection. I was usually driving to get my kid when the slew of calls would come in. “The fiber calls for you Paul… it beckons” and I’d have to pick my kid up and by the time I got back to work it was completely fine again.
The AT&T app said it was broken, but not much more beyond that. A tech was dispatched, we discussed what I was seeing, he said the old black thing was old and to swap it out with the new 1990’s beige thing, which looks exactly like the one I’ve got at my house. Swap completed I once again proceeded without any issues.
So if you’ve got an old black fiber wireless gateway from many a moon ago… I think it’s their dying time. They were released in 2016, have lived a long life, it’s time to put them out to pasture if things are getting strange and you have stripped away all other possibilities…
Sorry Ol’ Yeller… that’s what I named mine due to the yellow cable…
<bang>
Why… why are you getting back up? <bang>
No… this can’t be! <bang>
Stop! <bang> <bang> <bang> <bang> <bang> <click> ayeeeeiiii!
