u/sol1nvinctus

I'm not sure if this is happening to anyone else, but I switched over to Optimum Fiber last month, and as of a few days ago I'm getting periodic Internet loss every several hours or so. I lose Internet for about 3-7 minutes.

On their website, it says there's currently no outages or anything. This is super frustrating as this is literally only the first month I've used Optimum Fiber.

I recently switched to Optimum Fiber after they deployed in my area. I run my own router (Protectli running OPNsense) behind the ISP gateway, which requires bridge mode so my router gets a real public IP directly from Optimum's network rather than being double-NATed behind the gateway.

The technician who installed it informed me upfront that bridge mode has to be enabled by support; you can't do it yourself. That's already more annoying than other ISPs like Xfinity, where you can toggle it yourself. Fine, fuck it, for 2 gigabit fiber, I called.

What followed was two days of getting nowhere.

Multiple support calls, multiple agents claiming bridge mode was active, one agent toggling it on and off and power cycling the gateway, another claiming to be Tier 2 support. Every time, my router's WAN interface was still pulling a private 192.168.1.x address instead of a public IP.

How do I know it wasn’t in Bridge mode?

• A traceroute from behind my network showed two private hops before hitting Optimum's public network. That is technically impossible if bridge mode is active.
• Optimum's own web portal, accessible via your account at their website, shows the gateway running with a LAN gateway IP of 192.168.1.1 and an active DHCP server distributing 192.168.1.x addresses. In true bridge mode, that management plane would be unreachable from the customer side.
• One important note: checking speedtest.net and seeing a public IP does NOT prove bridge mode is working. Speedtest shows the gateway's own upstream connection punching through double-NAT. Your router's actual WAN IP is what matters, and if it's 192.168.1.x, you're being NATed.

The workaround I found:

Through Optimum's web portal, you can edit the gateway's LAN settings. I changed the gateway IP and DHCP range from 192.168.1.x to 10.0.0.x. This resolved a subnet conflict that was causing additional routing problems on top of the double-NAT, since OPNsense's default LAN subnet is also 192.168.1.x. If your router uses a different default LAN subnet (like 192.168.0.x) you may not hit this specific conflict.

To be clear: this is not a fix for bridge mode. I am still double-NATed behind Optimum's gateway, which is an unacceptable and subpar solution for my use case. Port forwarding for any self-hosted services requires forwarding on both the Optimum portal AND my own router. True bridge mode, where my router gets a real public IP directly from Optimum, is still not working.

I'll be filing an FCC complaint. If you're an Optimum Fiber customer trying to use your own router, know it's not going to be easy.