Hiya,

So we have in our apartment the One NZ unlimited 5G wireless broadband thing, and as a connection it's pretty goddamn solid. get anywhere from 400-700 mbit down, which we really can't complain about. And from a hardware perspective, the TP-Link router they gave us is perfectly fine.

But we are not here to discuss the hardware, we are here to discuss the horrific, abomination that is the software of the TP-Link Deco X80-5G.

Who, in their right mind, thought this was router firmware? There is no bridge mode. There is no ability to disable the DHCP server. there is... nothing.

We're wanting to put a UniFi Dream Router in front of this to use that as our actual router, but if we do that now, we'll have double NAT, which kills a fair few features of the UniFi, including magic site VPN.

The One NZ website suggests that you cannot use an alternative router, but the One NZ website also suggests that they're the best carrier ever, T-Mobile back home in Seattle would like a bloody word if they're about to go claim that.

We know the RBI sim cards are definitely TAC-locked, the Skinny urban wireless broadband ones are also. But is there any chance of a special case here? Hell, the Deco app is incredibly inaccessible with a screen reader on both android and iOS so that's a serious problem too, ngl.

All we want is this exact connection, a connection on which we get a public IPV4 address which is incredibly surprising, but using router hardware and software that, you know, doesn't call itself a "modem", and doesn't treat us as if this is our first ever internet connection, and oh we have opinions on how utterly insulting the treatment of customers by ISPs is in this country, not just assuming that they don't know what they're doing but putting them in a little box from which they can never emerge and taking away all their settings... but that's for another topic, we think.

Anyone from One NZ here able to:

• give us an actual, technical, in-depth reason why yous use such terrible hardware,
• Explain, in-depth instead of fobbing us off like the tech on the phone did, why you seem to enforce the use of one particular router,
• Find out whether this can be special-cased so we can actually use router hardware we remotely trust, and/or
• find out if we can terminate our contract and switch to 2degrees/Spark, assuming their 5G routers aren't equally locked-down shitshows