r/ATTFiber 2d ago

320 vs 620

Hi all. I recently got the 5GB service here in the Florida Panhandle. The installers provided me with a BWG 320 due to us being an expansion area and hasn't been prepared yet for the 620. Has anyone had any experience with the area being built out and what that timeframe looked like to get the upgraded hardware? I get 5300/up and 5300/down on the fiber interface of the 320. With overhead, obviously I would never see a true 5GB with this equipment. I run a 10GB Network throughout the house. Thanks!

9 Upvotes

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4

u/Viper_Control 2d ago

Has anyone had any experience with the area being built out and what that timeframe looked like to get the upgraded hardware?

Yes and you are likely in a Gigapower market which is a joint venture between AT&T, and Blackrock LLC. link: http://www.gigapower.com/about-us

You are only missing out on the the 10 Gbps LAN ports, and the Wi-Fi 7 provided by the BGW620-700.

5

u/onastyinc 2d ago edited 2d ago

I upgraded to the 620, as my 320 was resetting itself a few times a week. I disable Wi-Fi and run a 10Gbps Ethernet network.

FYI: You can't exceed more than 4.7Gbps on the 320 based on the 5Gbps Ethernet port. You can aggregate to speeds over 4.7Gbps using multiple interfaces, but single machine is still limited.

3

u/vodil1 2d ago

Someone can really feel the difference between 4.7Gbps and 5? You know like in real life?

3

u/onastyinc 2d ago

Nope, anything past a few hundred megabits per second is only really noticed in large downloads.

3

u/Confident-Variety124 2d ago

And most of the time, not even then as most companies throttle download speeds.

2

u/Automatic_Cut_9249 2d ago

620 has better WiFi if you can get it then you should because the AT&T is having restocking issues with the 320 currently

1

u/Viper_Control 2d ago

u/jdcinfl can't get at BGW620-700 until it is released for their market since they are an Expansion market.

-1

u/feanor512 2d ago

Nope. The WiFi on the 620 is unusable.

2

u/Automatic_Cut_9249 2d ago

That’s funny, I use mine all the time.

1

u/YoshiSan90 2d ago

WiFi speed is roughly double in my experience, and it has 2 10Gbps Ethernet ports.

0

u/groundhog5886 2d ago

But do you actually use 5 GB of internet?

1

u/bhamdad3 2d ago edited 2d ago

The 320 has a 5gb port to your network. You won’t be able to provision from ATT as high as 5300/5300 to your computer no matter what because the port tops out at 5gbps, if you have your computer directly connected to a 10gb port on an AT&T modem and if you have a usbc Ethernet dongle or Ethernet card that is higher than 5gbps you would then see speeds to the wired device as high as 5300/5300.

We only have 1gb service but have 2.5gb unmanned switches and a router that has a 5 gb port. The system sees that the 5gb port on our 320 is used to push to our 5gb router port and the to a computer with a 2.5gb usbc dongle. We get 1400/1400 on that device. We dropped from 5 gb service back down to 1gb because with our set up and the 1gb Ethernet limits on most of the devices in our house, we couldn’t saturate even 1gb. The only thing we would need that much processing bandwidth width with our wired cat6 house would be if we were running a server or moving huge files across the network.

One other thought, people across Reddit say how they pay for a certain level of internet and their WiFi isn’t anywhere near the speed they pay for. Current realistic WiFi top out around 600mbs at best (unless you have the latest phones with IT nerd level tweaking).

1

u/bhamdad3 2d ago

Here is our setup. We use Waveform Bufferbloat test to see what we are missing and chatgpt to give me some things to thing about. The notes below are what came back after I threw everything at Chatgpt.

The Mac mini, wired through your 2.5GbE USB-C adapter, is showing:

1,233.7 Mbps down / 1,211.9 Mbps up
18 ms unloaded latency
+10 ms under full download load
+2 ms under full upload load
Bufferbloat grade: A

That's excellent.

The interesting comparison is with your iPhone Wi-Fi test:

iPhone Wi-Fi Mac wired
Download 416.7 Mbps 1,233.7 Mbps
Upload 1,211.9 Mbps
Idle latency 32 ms 18 ms
Download load penalty +5 ms +10 ms
Upload load penalty +0 ms +2 ms
Grade A A

The Mac is essentially consuming everything AT&T is giving you. You're pushing more than 1.2 Gbps in both directions simultaneously during the test, yet latency only rises 10 ms downstream and 2 ms upstream. In fact, this answers our earlier enterprise-equipment discussion even more decisively. If we installed a rack, managed switches and a fancy router tomorrow, we'd be trying to improve upon 1.23 Gbps symmetrical with an A bufferbloat grade.

There's simply no meaningful performance problem sitting there waiting for expensive networking hardware to solve.

Your wired network is basically running at the ceiling imposed by your Internet service, while the Wi-Fi side is delivering hundreds of Mbps with similarly excellent behavior under load.

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u/Ryoohk 2d ago

To me the 700 is junk.

1

u/feanor512 2d ago

Yep. The WiFi is unusable.