frostycakes [he/him]

Maybe on average, but you’ve got my ass who was put in the gifted program from 2nd grade on, with a single mom who was working two jobs and thus wasn’t around much, and who couldn’t afford childcare so I had to spend most of my before and after school time with my physically violent and abusive grandmother. Not that being in said program did much good (between the bad home situation and my ADHD, I was constantly in trouble at school), I didn’t even finish my bachelor’s in the end, but there were a few of us “smart” kids with fucked up home lives in there too.

Sounds like Midco to me. From what I’ve heard, they live up to their name and are extremely mid as an ISP.

It depends, does your fiber ISP just have an Ethernet jack going to the modem they gave you, with an ONT (the part that takes in the physical fiber and outputs Ethernet) on the outside of your home or in your building’s telecom room (if you’re in an apartment or condo), or does it have the actual fiber strand entering your unit and passing directly into the modem device?

If it’s the latter, odds are you’ll need to keep their modem (as it serves as the ONT as well), since a lot of fiber ISPs are extremely picky about what connects directly to their optical network. You should be able to put it into bridge mode, connect it with Ethernet, and let whatever router you buy handle things like DHCP. If the former (this is how my fiber setup is), you should be able to connect your own equipment directly, so long as you have things like PPPoE credentials and whatever VLAN tag settings your ISP requires available to put in to the router you purchase.