I had my ATT Fiber installed, some information that might help..

[marxbros]

I just (yesterday) had my fiber to the home Gig connection installed and there were a few things that might be relevant to people preparing for their install or having one done in the future.

If you home is currently receiving service from an underground location, that is where they will bring the fiber into the home, if it is an aerial drop they have some choices, i/e side of the home, garage, etc.

They WILL need a 120v outlet available close to where they make entrance to power the fiber to Ethernet equipment. (There needs to be a 12v inverter plugged into 120v power to run the equipment) This was information I inquired Sonic about and I don't think support understood my question at the time.

Depending on where you locate your modem they will route a Ethernet cable from the point of entrance to where the modem will be located. In my case that would be a bedroom/office in the back part of my home so the tech routed the wire neatly via the exterior and entered the home that way. I can certainly crawl under my own home or shuttle it through the attic at a future date.

The modem provided is again an ATT dedicated device which was helpful to my in home network, I didn't have to make any sweeping changes to my current home network other than adjusting the name and passwords for the wifi.

The tech was friendly, neat, helpful, and polite. I am extremely happy that I have upgraded service through Sonic and look forward to when they can offer their own personal fiber in my area but in the meantime this is certainly great.

[apl]

Thanks for posting this.
I just signed up for this service, and so far information about what exactly the installation will entail has been scant.
I'm still not sure what the best setup for me will end up being, as our house is old and there isn't a power outlet near where the phone lines come inside, but hopefully the tech will help figure out an arrangement that works.

[marxbros]

Thanks for posting this.
I just signed up for this service, and so far information about what exactly the installation will entail has been scant.
I'm still not sure what the best setup for me will end up being, as our house is old and there isn't a power outlet near where the phone lines come inside, but hopefully the tech will help figure out an arrangement that works.

In my particular case the old phone lines attached to one side of my home and routed from that point. For the new install the tech routed the fiber to the other side of my home at the garage wall near my electrical sub panel which has an available 120v outlet. I'm sure if the outlet was in a remote part of my garage the fiber could have been routed as close as possible to another available outlet and at the worst an extension cord could be run until a proper outlet could be installed. Keep in mind your fiber tech will NOT install a 120v outlet for you, that is beyond their scope of work.

[radeyes]

What modem did you receive with your ATT Fiber install?
I just upgraded my Sonic service from FTTN to Fiber. My old modem was an NVG599, and the guy that installed my new Fiber gave me an NVG589 that was clearly previously used--it had a wifi network named something like John01 and a history of devices that were most certainly not mine.
Sort of feels like I got a downgrade.

[marxbros]

What modem did you receive with your ATT Fiber install?
I just upgraded my Sonic service from FTTN to Fiber. My old modem was an NVG599, and the guy that installed my new Fiber gave me an NVG589 that was clearly previously used--it had a wifi network named something like John01 and a history of devices that were most certainly not mine.
Sort of feels like I got a downgrade.

The tech installed a Arris BGW210-700. I suppose you could always do a factory reset on the modem to wipe it clean.

As to the quality of modem/router equipment ATT provides, I wish I wasn't bound to leasing their equipment. It's silly they make me pay a monthly fee to lease their equipment which I would happily purchase and be done with so I consider it a necessary evil. Eventually Sonic will hopefully run their own fiber and that will be the end of that but until then this is the next best solution.

[apl]

My situation ended up being a bit different, and my concerns about having power near where the phone lines and fiber came in were unnecessary.
They did install a box on the outside of the house, right where utility lines come from underground, but this is some kind of passive box (optical fiber in and optical fiber out) that doesn't require power:

exterior.jpg (34.48 KiB) Viewed 7285 times

The fiber out of this box goes along the exterior of the house (as my old phone lines do) and then well into the interior, to where I have computer equipment (and power). The small ONT (fiber to ethernet converter, which does require power) is mounted on an interior wall:

ont.jpeg (54.46 KiB) Viewed 7285 times

The modem/router, like yours, is an Arris BGW210.

Installation took around 2 hours. It was another few hours before service was active, as the tech said I was the first on my block to have fiber activated, and he needed to work (off-site) with both ATT and Sonic to make sure the right signal was getting fed to my line. He texted me when it was working, around 6 PM.
All in all, a pretty smooth experience, a huge improvement over DSL, and it only took 1 week from placing the order with Sonic until activation.

[jsbeddow]

This has been a really helpful thread, I only wish I had found it before ordering Sonic fiber one week ago. Like others, I have been mostly impressed by their service level and promptness: only one week from the original order date to the "proposed installation" date (today 3/22/19, although I have deliberately deferred that until Thursday 3/28/19).

That being said, I wish some items were better explained: it took quite a bit of searching and asking in other Sonic forum posts to determine that only the true Sonic owned and installed "native service area" FTTP installations (as opposed to the re-sold AT&T fiber installations) get an ONT that can truly function directly to a customer's router without needing one of the "forced rentals" of a residential gateway (RG) from AT&T. Given all the problems I see on various other forums (see: DSLReports, AT&T, SNBForums), with customers complaining about the very poor implementations of firmware on these AT&T supplied RGs (both the Pace 5268 and Arris BGW210) that at best are semi-functional in Bridge Mode (aka: IP-Passthrough, DMZ Plus, etc), or not at all, this is really causing me to reconsider my choice of Sonic FTTP service. Frankly, I'm surprised I have not run across more complaints of this issue here on the Sonic Access forum, or at least more discussion of potential workarounds. I really, REALLY don't want to give up using my own router (an Asus RT-AC68P running the Merlin customized firmware with various add-ons and scripts that further extend it's functionality and security).

Has anyone here on Sonic tried the switch based "hardware bypass" method? This seems to work well, as long as there are no power interruptions, ie: all items are on UPS devices. This method is best explained in the post by "rijh" on this page:
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/att-g ... ost-445195
I sincerely hope this method will work for me.

Also, on the subject of this thread about installation experiences and hardware devices, I just received (today, by USPS) the small box format Grandstream VOIP adapter that will have to be attached to the ports of a router or RG. It closely resembles many of the other VOIP boxes on the market that I have used in the past (including my old Linksys PAP2T, and the Obihai Obi200 that I currently use with Google Voice and other SIP services). This is a bummer in the sense that I was under the impression that it was directly the ONT device (hopefully the Adtran 411, but again perhaps only for native Sonic Fiber markets) that had a phone VOIP port: this would have made for a much cleaner installation in my garage, where I could have very easily had this device serve certain phones in the home, and still maintain others served by my old AT&T POTS service (for backup service). Grrr...yet another regret, and the service is not even installed yet....

[bubba198]

Hi, Can anyone post the make/model of AT&T's ONT? I am curious what they use on the plant side of things with their PON deployment. It clearly isn't Adtran gear like Sonic. Thank you

[timyu94]

Hi, Can anyone post the make/model of AT&T's ONT? I am curious what they use on the plant side of things with their PON deployment. It clearly isn't Adtran gear like Sonic. Thank you

They use Alcatel Lucent / Nokia PON equipment.

[bubba198]

Thank you - and does their ONT have coax out to hook up to a TV? Or HDMI out or DP out?