I am currently living with my parents and we have just started an Internet contract with a 5G wireless company.

The issue is the MFND settings are behind a password and likely not allowed access by the ISP. Even if they weren’t doing port forwarding on 5G likely isn’t possible because of CGNAT. I think I can use cloudflare tunnels or tailscale to get around this, and not many things need to be directly accessible from the Internet.

The more annoying thing is that setting DHCP reservations likely isn’t possible without getting access to the settings. It’s going to make setting up static IPs difficult too.

Before anyone asks fixed line Internet almost certainly isn’t practical in this area. Getting our own modem while possible is more expensive and potentially difficult, and would mean cancelling the contract.

Is there a reasonable way to work around these issues?

Any help or advice would be appreciated.

  • Encrypt-KeeperEnglish
    5•9 months ago

    In this scenario you could just get your own firewall to serve as an NAT gateway and connect its WAN port to the LAN side of your ISP’s gateway. You’d then have your own LAN you can do whatever you want on. The ISP’s device would provide the WAN IP to your gateway via DHCP, but that DHCP wouldn’t work through your gateway. You’d just make sure your new internal LAN(s) subnet is different from the one that exists between your firewall and your ISP’s gateway. The only problems this would cause in your scenario are because there’s now double the NAT going on, but if you’re already dealing with CGNAT then you’d already have those same problems.

    Outbound traffic should all work just fine, and your ISP’s device would no longer have access to your LAN.