Fixed wireless internet has really been taking off in the United States lately. It’s no secret that the wired internet situation throughout the country is pretty terrible, with most places only having a single provider to “choose” from, often complete with high prices, slow speeds, and unreliable service. Using a nearby cell tower for internet instead is tempting for a lot of people, and carriers are perfectly happy to monetize that desire.
T-Mobile, Verizon, and lately even AT&T have been ramping up availability of their LTE and 5G Home Internet services, along with production of various first-party gateways to give customers a plug-and-play experience.
In general, AT&T has been taking things a bit more slowly than T-Mobile and Verizon, but that isn’t stopping them from having new gateway devices made, and that’s what we’re here to talk about.
The Specs and Such
AT&T’s upcoming Home Internet gateway is made by Sagemcom and has the model number BGW530-900. You may recognize that brand from T-Mobile’s Home Internet gateway lineup, as Sagemcom produced a similar gateway for Big Magenta, the Fast 5688W.
Basics
Like the T-Mobile gateway made by Sagemcom, this one appears to be a tall, black rectangular box of some sort, with two Ethernet ports, a likely-inactive USB-C port, a power button, and a 12V power input. Weirdly, it appears to use a barrel plug for power instead of the USB-C Power Delivery seen on the T-Mobile variant.
WiFi
As you might expect from a Home Internet gateway, the Sagemcom BGW530-900 is an all-in-one device, handling cellular connections, routing, and WiFi. As is standard with today’s wireless routers, this one has dual-band WiFi 6 onboard.
There’s no mention of a 6GHz channel, so no WiFi 6E here, sadly. It also doesn’t support WiFi 7, but seeing as the standard was only just finalized, that’s forgivable.
Aside from the WiFi generations themselves, it looks like the new gateway supports 20MHz and 40MHz bandwidths on 2.4GHz, and 20MHz, 40MHz, 80MHz, and 160MHz on 5GHz.
160MHz (assuming I’m reading these confusing test documents right) is also nice to see, since it should give people in more rural areas a nice speed bump with supported clients.
Interestingly, tests were explicitly performed on different bandwidths, so it’s possible we’ll see a configuration option for users to set the bandwidth manually. If so, it would be quite the departure from T-Mobile’s Home Internet gateways, which are now notorious for being incredibly locked down and requiring hacky workarounds and third party apps like HINT Control to gain any control over them at all.
Cellular
On the cellular side of things, it’s clear the Sagemcom BGW530-900 is meant to be for AT&T and AT&T only. It supports LTE bands 2, 5, 12, 14, 17, 30, and 66, and 5G bands 2, 5, 12, 30, 66, and 77. While there’s some overlap with other carriers here, you’re probably not going to have a great experience using this on T-Mobile’s 5G-band-41-focused network (assuming the device isn’t locked to AT&T anyway). This is annoyingly common with carrier-specific gateways, though, so I can’t really specifically blame AT&T here.
Beyond the basic band support, things get a little more confusing. It does seem like the gateway supports 5G standalone, but it’s not clear which bands are standalone-capable, which bands require an LTE base signal, or which LTE bands are supported for non-standalone mode.
The carrier aggregation situation is also similarly confusing, with conflicting specs in different documents. One interesting thing is how low the supported bandwidths are for some 5G bands. 5G band 30 only supports up to 10MHz bandwidth, for instance, while 66 can go up to 40MHz, and 77 can do 100MHz. This might be an effect of how much bandwidth AT&T has licensed from the FCC, but it seems weird not to future-proof.
Modem
Finally, there’s a mention of the specific modem model inside the gateway: the Quectel RG520N-AT. Quectel doesn’t mention this specific variant anywhere I can find (only -EU and -US), but if it’s anything like the two that are public, it’s soldered and not in an M.2 slot. This is pretty standard, but seeing as Quectel sells similar modems that are removable and use a standard interface, it would’ve been nice for upgradeability. Lets face it though, most customers won’t be upgrading the modem their carrier gives them anyway.
Also using info from the other variants, this modem has the following theoretical max speeds: 2.4Gbps down/900Mbps up on 5G standalone, 3.4Gbps down/550Mbps up on 5G non-standalone, and 1.6Gbps down/200Mbps up on LTE. Remember that theoretical speeds are basically never reached in the real world, and AT&T’s band selection could affect them further.
Conclusions
The new AT&T gateway is a big step in the company’s push towards 5G Home Internet adoption. Their current (and first) gateway seemed almost designed to look elegant and pretty, featuring a dot-style LED display on the front and having an almost floating oval shape. This model appears to be more in form with what the other big carriers are doing: a simple robust design that has the one job of turning cell signals into WiFi.
Since there are confidentiality agreements in place with Sagemcom and the FCC we don’t yet know what the device will look like in-person (and assembled). We can expect to see the external photos in a few months once the confidentiality expires, or perhaps sooner if AT&T announces the device.
We’ll keep you updated once we have that and more.
