I'm kinda amazed, but here goes.

My previous home network was using AT&T U-verse's proprietary VDSL2 thing for 15Mbps down/1.5MBps up hooked to my home network with an Apple Airport Extreme. It turned out that I could save myself some serious money by killing my POTS line and instead getting AT&T's VoIP service.

Installer #1 reinforced my general impression of AT&T. Arrived at 11:30am for a "9-10am" appointment. Came without the necessary cables or parts. Yammered on for an hour before leaving. So I rescheduled.

Installer #2 arrived today at 9:42am for the same time slot. 90 minutes later, I now have a new gateway box (now with an internal backup battery). I blew another hour getting it properly configured (i.e., disable all firewall packet filtering crap, put it in "passthrough" mode, etc.) and rejiggering my Airport Extreme configuration.

Now, though, everything works, like better than it ever did beforehand. I can finally ssh from the outside world to my desktop at home. Previously, I was stuck with a "double NAT" configuration that totally prevented this from working, but now it's good. I'm not 100% sure if it's just a new feature ("IP passthrough") or if it's that I finally found decent advice to configure everything. (Note that that advice incorrectly suggests using non-private IP addresses for your private NAT. Otherwise, it tells you to do things that seem to work.)

I still want to get myself AT&T "GigaPower", but I'm stuck on their privacy violation engine. Also, the Rice IT guys were like "oh no, don't get it, it totally doesn't work yet". I can wait.