NAT (Forwarding) in T-Mobile Gateway

Kevin71246 wrote:

I spoke with TMobile Home Internet technical support over the past week. They are working on the port forwarding feature within their 5g modem/router, but it's not available or ready yet. 

2 different techs said they have a workaround, however (& it doesn't require 3rd party services).

I haven't tested it yet, but what you need to do is, & many of us have this setup already, connect via Ethernet (wire) the garbage can LAN port <-> YOUR own router.  Then configure port forwarding on YOUR router. That's it. (Your router needs to support ipv6! Not sure if we need to allow ipv6 passthrough for this.)

Now, I was educated a long time ago on IPv4 & they barely touched on IPv6, so I don't know a lot about it, but this would never work this way with IPv6. Ipv6, however can allow passthrough so public "internet" can pass through a router, which is why I'm "buying" this theory.  Ie, you can go through T-Mobiles garbage can, and then your router, and you device (call it a PC) could have a public IPv6 IP, which is why port forwarding could work this way.

Anyone have time to test & report back? Or comments?

I previously had a dynamic public IP (ipv4) that I made work with my domain name via ZoneEdit that allowed my PC to update ZoneEdit with public Ip changes since it was dynamic. With this NEW setup, I'm not exactly sure how that would work, or if my DNS service will play nicely or even support ipv6 or if ZoneEdit will either. And I have numerous services that I need to "hit" MY router & forward internally, such as a VPN, RDP, FTP, website, etc - not sure if all that will play nicely - or if all the services, like VPN client, can point to a domain->ipv6 ip & work. Like will the VPN client config & SW accept this new format?

Anyways, lot of testing & messing around needed!  Please report back with any updates!

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This doesn't work because the ports can't route from the T-Mobile gateway to the router. Also, the way T-Mobile's network is setup, it's basically a no-go.

I did get some things to work using the ZeroTier software. But, it needs both the ZeroTier server software running on the local device you want to access and the ZeroTier client software running from the device you want to connect from. This works from my phone (running the ZeroTier client) to my NAS (running a ZeroTier server on a Docker container).

It's a clunky "solution" that only solves some problems. Really, the T-Mobile internet modem needs to add a few features (DNZ as minimum, but port forwarding and assigning an IP address).

I hear there's a new T-Mobile internet modem coming soon that will not only add these features, but also support the higher 5G frequencies for higher speeds. This is great for me as I have a T-Mobile millimeter wave tower on the boulevard right across the street from my house (formally a Sprint tower). But, no word yet on when this will be released.