Tech Thoughts: WiFi 6, Xfinity Gateway and Using My Own Router
One of the downsides of my move meant that I was losing ATT Fiber, and my only option for internet at a decent speed was Xfinity. I haven't been an Xfinity customer for well over 15+ years, so it's interesting to see how things have changed since then. Going into my new place, I was originally going to put the Xfinity-provided gateway into bridge mode and use the Ubiquity Dream Machine I had bought but never used. Initially to get internet going at my apartment, though, I just set up the gateway as normal and connected to it.
At that point, I found out it had WIFI 6 support, which my recently rehabbed desktop also supported. My main concern with having the desktop being wireless, though, was whether or not it would be fast enough to support streaming to Twitch. I got a chance to test that out this past Thursday and I found that it works great! A few of my followers even commented that the stream seemed even better than before, which floored me. This is great news for me, though, since now I won't have to figure out how to route an ethernet cable across the entire apartment.
The gateway is pretty limited, though. I can't change the assigned DNS servers, so once I get a a Pi-Hole configured, I would have to manually change over every device by hand, which I'd rather not do. I had a Dream Machine, but since I need the speed of WiFi 6, it's not going to be a good fit. In the end, I opted to go with an ASUS RT-AX86U after some research and recommendations. Thus far, it's working out pretty well and I'm happy with it.