Do you recognize one of these modems? New wireless internet offers by T-Mobile, AT&T, MetroPCS and others might have great speedtest results, but be hamstrung by instability entirely due to how these companies provision your service.

None of the hardware above comes with even a public IPv4 address, limiting your ability to interact with the internet, and drastically decreasing reliability of connections you make out to the internet.

Network Address Translation

The root of the problem is Network Address Translation (NAT), a technology that was once only used by your router at home to share one public IP address amongst many computers. This technology has been co-opted by Telecom companies to allow them to serve thousands of customers with one public IP address.

Sharing with Carrier Grade NAT

Your address on the internet is being shared amongst so many different people when you are behind a Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT), websites like Google, Cloudflare protected websites and streaming services like FuboTV often treat your attempts to reach them as a risky connection needing further authentication like a ReCAPTCHA challenge or forcing you to go through two factor authentication.

CGNAT prevents you from receiving any inbound connections, causing issues including limited online connectivity for console games, making camera systems inaccessible, causing remote desktop connections to use a slower relay to connect you to the remote computer, and many other inbound connections issues.

The other gotcha with CGNAT is the limited memory of a thing called the state table. With NAT, you have to track every active connection, and many types of connections linger in a  seemingly open state for hours or days. The limited memory of the CGNAT hardware used by many ISPs causes these longer lived connections to get dropped at random, resulting in half loaded webpages, video and audio calls 📞 where part of the audio or video is lost, and numerous other irritating issues that are hard to debug.

Taking Control with a Public IP

Much like having your own mailbox, a public IP address all of the challenges and issues caused by CGNAT disappear. There is no more NAT between your network’s edge and the internet, and your local router has plenty of memory to store the state table of connections from your network many times over.

Let us help you!

If you have any of the hardware shown above please contact us today for a free account review. Our knowledgeable team has worked with dozens of ISPs and is adept at securing public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, rooting out signal quality issues, and advocating for your best interests!

Get better connected at a lower cost by talking with us today!