NAT (Forwarding) in T-Mobile Gateway

teckel wrote:

inteller wrote:

Holy sh* man you are saying exactly what I'm stating!  The right thing to do would be instead of trying to work against me, work WITH me to pressure T-Mobile to get this deivce more functional and then we can ALL do whatever we want with it.

 

 

 

All T-mobile has to do is enable the device to bridge.  That's it.  I know this because that's how my cable modem worked and I was able to do everything else I wanted from there.  So if you want to sit there and tell me the networking configuration I used for YEARS was 'incorrect' and didn't work, go right ahead…..but you are not helping. You can be an apologist for why they don't enable these things, but this device is for HOME INTERNET.  I do not sit at home on my phone and nothing else. If that is T-mobile's position then I'll be returning it and wait until they grow up.

Actually, we're not at all saying the same thing.  You believe the modem could be updated with a few feature and it would work.  I'm saying that's not the case, as you're basically behind T-Mobile's NAT/VPN so enabling features on the model wouldn't solve the problem one bit.

How exactly do do believe enabling bridge mode would solve your problem?  You're comparing your cable company's network with T-Mobile, which are TOTALLY different.  Your cable company didn't hide your connection behind a NAT/VPN.  You could identify your home connection with a unique IP address which you could access remotely (with or without a DDNS like NoIP).  But T-Mobile's network doesn't work like your cable company.  Every connection is like a VPN or NAT, where there's not a unique IP address, but it's shared with many other people.

So, lets's say bridge mode is available on your T-Mobile modem.  How would you remotely access your home modem?  By IP? Via a DDNS like NoIP?  Nope!  As there's still not a unique IP address assigned to your home connection, it's shared with thousands of other people.  So you would try to access your home network and it could never route to your home.

So I'm sorry, you don't know what you're talking about.  You have limited knowledge and basing your assumptions on how your cable company's network is configured, when in reality T-Mobile's network isn't at all setup the same way, and as a result, your assumption that bridge mode will solve everything is totally wrong.  Sorry, it's not as simple as that.

You are forgetting, that T-Mobile LTE gateway works just fine when switched into a bridge mode! So, it is not the network issue per se, it is a firmware issue on this 5G trashcan.

I agree TMobile could have made this much easier by providing an internet facing IP address, as well as IP scope control and other things. But there are easy ways to get your setup working if you have another router.

To start, just have another router and connect either of the yellow ports of the TMobile gateway connected to the internet port (WAN) of your router. Now you have complete control over your internal network with DHCP, Scope, Static IPs if you want, Firewall rules for the internet, etc.

The next thing is to use something like the free version of TeamViewer, which will create the path through the internet to your computer for remote access and you can remote into your computer from outside the network whenever you want.

For security system viewing, just setup the viewing app on your home computer (which you probably already have) and remote into your computer and view your cameras that way. TeamViewer has a version for Windows computers, phones, tablets, Linux, MacOS, Raspberry Pi. So pretty much any device you have.

I know this is a workaround for T-Mobile's lack of services on the gateway, but it works great, it's reliable, it's a free solution, and restores functions many people need. It's also only takes a couple of minutes to setup. I use it all the time and I have no issues. I'm sure you could do this with other remote services that are available, but I prefer TeamViewer over many of the non-trusted remote services available.

Good Luck

On the waiting list ‘ere.

As far as I’m reading there’s passthrough which’ll let me reuse our existing network and maybe treat the modem as a dumb modem like we're doing to our ADSL modem. Our modem doesn't even do the job of providing DHCP; effectively as if we connected directly to our ISP's network.

Sin embargo,, from reading it sounds like T-Mobile is doing carrier level NAT for IPv4 similar to what I’ve been hearing with Starlink on their equipment; basically I could be sharing 18.0.12.3 between five other customers.

And IPv6 is not our silver bullet since it sounds like T-Mobile’s network is filtering requests before it even hits the equipment if I’m understanding what I’m reading.

IPv4 is a nice-to-have but at the same time it's deadweight going forward since IPv4 served it's purpose and is more of a nuisance. I can grab a IPv4 address---until IPv6 reigns supreme on public Wi-Fi---and set up tunneling and be happy with that so I can control my smart-home server wherever.

@jarrodsfarrell what solution are you using to tunnel? I've setup ngrok to get around the port-forwarding on a laptop running behind the T-Mobile 5G POS Modem, but it's not persistent. Every time I lose power or the internet connection is interrupted, the tunnel drops and I lose all remote connectivity. With CG-NAT I don't see how it's ever going to be possible to host an OpenVPN server from inside my network, even with port-forwarding, so I have to find something more durable.

@arcanenox OpenVPN here since our existing ADSL with TDS allows our public IP to be reached. But for your issue specifically I don't have a tidy solution given I was going to suggest Cloudflare's Argo Tunnel, but it looks like it might be limited to protocols that can give a hint to what service they're trying to access or require software on the client otherwise for some turducken solution. https://danishshakeel.me/creating-an-ssh-tunnel-using-cloudflare-argo-and-access/

Full disclosure, I’m not certified in any capacity for network engineering: I’m a hobbyist.

But having to establish a tunnel with Argo then OpenVPN for local access is obviously not a nice solution. If someone has a better solution it'd be nice, but my working theory if I have to deal with this is renting a cheap VPS and set up OpenVPN to connect my firewall to with some route trickery to route traffic from the VPS to the firewall over OpenVPN. And if I'd want to expose a service from within my network then I'd use a IP Table rule to port-foward the traffic.

E.g.

VPS OpenVPN announces it handles IPs going to 192.168.0.0/16, 192.168.7.0/24 is where VPN clients live, and 192.168.1.0/24 is where the home network lives.

IP route on the VPS to direct 192.168.1.0/24 to whatever IP the firewall is given by OpenVPN (192.168.7.2 as example.)

IP route on the firewall (if needed) to direct 192.168.7.0/24 to the VPS (192.168.7.1 as example.)

So when I'm connected to the VPS VPN, accessing a service on 192.168.1.5 routes to the VPS, the VPS routes to the firewall, and the firewall routes it to the service. And the service can reply back in reverse order.

Overall hopefully reducing cruft in the connection. But does mean trading the OpenVPN job from my firewall to the VPS and losing some convenience (I can mint config files in pfSense to quickly get my devices working as an example.)

For my part, I live on a boat, using the Inseego Wifi Router.  Bandwidth is good, but I have the problem when trying connect to Minecraft hosted instances and playing astroneer.  I also have an Android Samsung A52, that I use as a hotspot on the T-Mobile Network.  Zoom works for meetings w/ work (kind of had to set up my laptop as a DMZ machine to get it to work).  Long story short.  I have an iPhone that has Verizon, and no problems.  On the Verizon network I have no problem with Minecraft, Zoom, or Astroneer.  Whatever T-Mobile is doing on their network to hack around their lack of IP addresses (or whatever their major malfunction is) does not appear to exist on Verizon.  I tried ZeroTier and was not able to get it to work, but I'm sure I probably could if I had the time/motivation to get a VPN properly working.  The main problem is that the IP address that presents to the Internet can never route back to my actual box, e.g. you connect to the outside world but the  IP address presented to the Internet  will never route back to your local box because of the way CGNAT (carrier grade NAT) that is being implemented on T-Mobile.  In other words, you make a connection to a remote host and they try to connect back to the IP address that they think you are connecting from and it doesn't actually connect back to the host that you are connecting from.  It's not a problem w/ the modem or your device, it's on the T-Mobile network.  It works on Verizon, not on T-Mobile.  If you want to solve this problem either T-Mobile has to fix their broken network, or you need to switch to Verizon.

extremetm wrote:

 

Edit: ignore my reply.

My nat was strict and couldn’t play in a party on Xbox.

Great lad at customer service had me run 2 speed tests and that pushed me into whatever and now the nat is open. Yay for cgnat 

So I’m having NAT Issues for my ps4 where I’m trying to connect with people in elden ring which I need a NAT 2 and I have no idea how to change the NAT type from 3 to 2 on my 5g gateway please help help help help help is there any way around this or a way 

I recently purchased a new home that came with a "Home Automation Kit". This included a Ring doorbell, Samsung Smartthings Hub (to connect to Z-Wave thermostats) and a Genie Aladdin Connect garage Door Control Module. I have the T-Mobile 5G modem with WiFi turned off and a Netgear AP connected for WiFi. 

The Ring doorbell works over WiFi. The Samsung Smartthings Hub will not connect (using Ethernet port on T-Mobile modem or WiFi). The Aladdin Connect module will not connect via WiFi. 

The installer immediately indicated that the Smartthings hub would not work with my “hot spot” and it didn’t. 

Has anyone been able to get a Smartthings Hub working with the T-Mobile 5G modem.