ATT Fiber BGW320 - Has anyone truly been able to get IP Passthrough to work?

I bought the Deco routers to replace my aging Orbi routers which I had switched to being access points in the years past because they kept locking up.
My goal with this purchase was to use the Deco as my true router so I can have parental controls and change my DNS to an internal machine (PiHole) to block ads on the network.(The BGW320 does not allow custom DNS servers)
The problem I am facing is that the Deco router is not being given a true external IP address from the ATT Router, the "IP Passthrough" function does not appear to actually do anything.
On the BGW I have changed the following
1) disabled wifi
2) Turned off all firewall functions
3) Disabled packet filters
4) Enabled IP Passthrough
The Deco is still being served up a 192.168 IP address from the ATT router. Which is causing network slowness and the dreaded double NAT
Things that stand out
1) If you look online about this.... half of the posts say it's easy just set up IP passthrough. The other half say it's not possible.
2) I believe routers have 2 MAC addresses? The sticker on the bottom of the Deco state that the MAC address ends in "50" but in the BGW320 it sees it ending in "51". I've tried both. neither seem to work
Has anyone actually been able to get this to work? Or is it time to give up and return these Deco routers?
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@jzchen I've had much the same experience as you've described more clearly here. For context, all of my devices are hooked up via ethernet to one of the 2 BE63 router APs/Meshs.
My situation has been that when I initially hooked up the BE63 to my BG gateway, everything worked pretty much flawlessly. My Xbox (Series X) was showing great speeds much more similar to what I'm supposed to be getting as opposed to the BG gateway and yet I still was experiencing some strange behavior. The Xbox was showing a strict NAT and my Plex server was still not accessible outside my Local Network and showed "Double NAT detected". This was all while UPnP was enabled. After some attempts at Port Forwarding (didn't change anything) checks on Public IP and Open Ports, I decided to do some cable rerouting and reconfiguring as well as some router and gateway restarts.
I then experienced some new issues and some resolutions to my old issues. Suddenly the Xbox was showing a fully open NAT, while my Plex server was still showing that it was unable to be accessed remotely, although my Steam Deck was able to stream from my Xbox remotely, meaning that UPnP was working somewhat, but the BG firewall was still getting in the way. This behavior has been inconsistent and highly volatile until now. Regardless of my testing or different scenarios that I attempted, I have been unable to replicate any specific outcomes with reliability. It does seem to be mostly related to restarts of the gateway or the routers and the timings between either of those.
Another additional problem that I've been having is that IPv6 sometimes does not show as enabled despite me enabling it within the BE63. Again, online checks through IP checkers, Port checkers or IPv4 or IPv6 checks show nothing has been solved (ie, no open ports, no IPv6, etc). My Xbox mostly shows an Open NAT with IPv4 and IPv6 but will occasionally revert to Double or Strict NAT and IPv4 only.
I tried speaking to AT&T customer service about this and they told me point blank that I know more about this than they do (overseas support, I have been unable to reach somebody American) and that they do not have the advanced training in such technical areas to be able to help me. They did also claim that my IP pass-through was working perfectly and that I shouldn't have any issues (after accessing my Internet connection) but obviously this isn't the case. They instructed me to seek out Geek Squad assistance (lol I balked at that but I don't really have other options atm) so I did through their in store desk who told me to call up their number because I wouldn't be able to get something done in store. They would have to send the technician out to my home for an initial consultation fee of (won hundred fivty...this forum doesn't allow monetary posts apparently, lol) which is when I declined to do that.
In conclusion, I'm having the exact same issues, but because my speeds are much better and I needed the additional Ethernet ports and customization options I have decided to keep the BE63. It really seems as if it's up to AT&T to fix either their poor software protocols (I can't believe the gateway settings are still basically the same as they were when my parents had U-Verse Internet over a decade ago) or their lackluster hardware (the gateways are garbage).
I'll post if something changes in the future but currently sol on this.
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@JDThreeee So, I think I have found a pseudo workaround. I changed the DHCP Lease from 1 Day down to 5 minutes for the private networking side on the BGW-320. My thought was if everything reboots AND the passthrough device gets a Local Address initially (from whatever timing issue this thing has) that when the device goes to renew it's IP Address, said timing will be resolved and then the BGW-320 will give it the appropriate WAN IP Address as configured from the Passthrough Mode. It may of actually done that before but with a DHCP Lease of 1 Day, it would take 12/24 hours for it to occur.
I made the change to 5 minutes. Rebooted everything, noticed my TP-Link was getting a 192. address. Waiting about 10 minutes and checked again in the app and it then had a WAN Address (before I would have to manually mess with it to get it to go from LAN to WAN address).
Thinking 5 minutes is fine given there is only one device attached to the Gateway so really shouldn't be any overhead. Really there will be no overhead as once the Passthrough address is assigned, it has it's own lease and at that point, there are no LAN DHCP clients. Help implies can change it as low as 3 minutes
Going to leave like this, maybe reboot a couple times. Not really solving the timing problem this BGW-320 has but seems to workaround the Passthrough issue so that it ieventually get's the WAN address.
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