Greetings, Folks.
I have had Uverse for 3 years now, and the Motorola NVG589 I was originally issued finally got overwhelmed by the noise on the lines. My neighborhood is an older one, with the infrastructure having been built out in the early 80's and not touched since then. The remote terminal was upgraded through the years, and in sometime in the recent years, the RT was upgraded with fiber back to the CO, and our 'hood finally got Uverse.
Due to my distance from the RT, I needed pair bonding to get the 22/2 profile, so I was issued the NVG589. At that time, it was the only gateway device that supported pair bonding. One of my two lines was terribly noisy, and I think that the level of noise on that line finally killed the old 589 as it was rebooting at least once a day, and on some days multiple times per hour. I finally reset the device to defaults and went through the two-hour process to rebuild my configuration (a gripe to be addressed later). However, all was not well as enabling IPv6 disabled all LAN connectivity, and it still rebooted at least once every 5 days.
So, I contacted AT&T and requested a new gateway. I was hoping for the NVG599, but the tech showed up with the Pace 5286AC. While he was running all his tests and getting the beast hooked up (it's literally twice as big as the NVG589), I did some quick research and had high hopes for the new device, as it proclaimed "The dual-core CPU and hardware accelerated routing translates into exceptional performance for every application".
After it was up and running, my hopes were dashed. That dual-core processing power is apparently focused on the networking side of things, which I'm ok with, but they totally missed the mark with the UI.
As for the network performance, the new gateway can handle the noise level on the lines, and gives me a max down sync rate of 29615 kbs on line 1, and 27133 kbs on line 2. Line 2 is roughly the same as the 589 - it is the clean line. Line 1, however, is what killed the previous unit - max down rate on that one was in the vicinity of 14000kbs.
WiFi performance is roughly equal. I only have 3 5GHz devices, so the 5GHz wasn't that important to me. The 2.4Ghz range appears to be about the same - I haven't run any signal strength tests yet as I'm not sure I am going to keep using it.
Regarding the UI - this gateway is horrible. It is terribly slow. For example, here is a screen shot of the timeline - this timeline was recorded from the home page, clicking on Settings > Firewall > Applications, Pinholes and DMZ, and then selecting a system to apply a rule to. In total, that took 32 seconds. When selecting a system to apply a firewall rule (or application pinhole) to, it takes 4 seconds to come back. Creating custom rules is also tediously slow. The UI appears as if it was created in 1994 - there is absolutely no modern style to the UI. This may actually be a good thing, considering the lack of computing resources available to the configuration interface.
Now, a feature request for all AT&T router gateways - a configuration backup and restore. Ideally, the configuration would be a text (or XML) file that can be edited in order to more quickly create (and script) complicated configurations, however I would accept a binary file at this point since there is currently no option at all.
So, solely due to the torturous UI on the 5286ac, I am finally forced to give up using it as my main AP and router. I will be deploying a small system (an old Dell small form-factor Pentium 4) with PFSense and an Intel dual port gigabit ethernet card, and Ubiquiti UniFI AC access points throughout the house.
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