AT&T - BGW210 Wi-Fi Gateway

Just to illustrate the BS of "best you can afford" ... My apartment is one unit in a three-flat (that I own). As an incentive I offer free WiFi to residents in other units, I tell them I have gigabit fiber (which I do). During the pandemic, there were six people living upstairs, four that were WFH, one a web developer and when I asked "how's the WiFi" they said it was really good. All that (plus me) was on the ATT-provided BGW-210, with GbE wired to a TP-Link WDR-3600 as an AP.

It depends on the size of your house, construction, and all that. The standard ATT wifi 5 fiber router worked great when I was in a 1br flat. Now, I live in a 1br two story concrete building with a structured wiring enclosure and the ONT in my ~~bedroom~~ closet with 20-30 IoT devices connected. Would get 10mbps on WiFi in the loft til I put the stock router in bridge mode and got a new router with more antennae and wifi6. Tried an extender from ATT since I have wired to the loft, went to 100mbps, but was still kinda unreliable for some reason. If I tried to set up iot stuff far away from the router, it would sometimes fail to connect or lose signal with my lights upstairs and mess up automations. After the new router? Everything's more reliably connecting/automating. Also most Americans with the disposable income to be buying these routers live in larger homes, so they probably have a decent sized need to get signal around places. So you're not wrong that the stock ones aren't as bad as they used to be but there's still plenty of reasons to run your own. Edit: closet, note about extender.

This is the easy route, but not the only route. Depends on your level of technical expertise, budget and how much you actually want to mess with it. For my part I have my older BGW210 on its own Ethernet port off my Mikrotik RB5009 with the SFP port connected indirectly to the fiber (through a CRS310 with some VLAN rules) and I just pass authentication requests using firewall rules but otherwise my RB5009 is the only device doing actual routing. Agree about turning the wifi off though :)

I have the same AT&T BGW. Agreed, the config panel is limited and horrible. I set mine up as a pass-through to a Firewalla Gold SE. I’m so glad I did. The Firewalla UI is so easy to use and versatile.