I've been trying to add a few more voice-controlled lights to my house beyond the two white Hue bulbs I got as a gift once and two months and about a hundred dollars spent on random junk (a quarter of which works) later I'm about to do it. I lost my mind. I first tried cheap Zigbee bulbs and "ZigBee-HomeKit gateways" only to find out that it's basically a coin toss if any gateway recognizes a particular bulb and another coin toss if it appears in Home. (Cheap bulbs with horrible colors are the only winners.) So I learned about Thread/Matter and was like "oh, good, someone is finally cleaning up the mess." I tried connecting both the Hue bridge and one of the new Nanoleaf Essentials bulbs that work natively on the Thread, both with the same results: pairing with the gadget succeeds, shows up in the house, and immediately switches to "unresponsive accessory". Googling it tells me "oh mDNS is probably working funny on your network" but what do I do with this information? My network, like everyone else here, is the "modem-router combination your ISP gives you". This device is very stuck and dumb, I tried unchecking all the checkboxes in the "firewall" section to no effect and that's it. It can't just be switched to crappy modem mode to put a better router behind it - it used to be possible, but they removed that years ago. I asked my ISP tech support about it and they said "oh you can use your own router and turn off the wifi on ours!" I've tried many times to still connect my own router behind it, but I've never been able to get things connected to this second box to see the internet, which is required to set up a HomePod. Connecting that router in access point mode works for regular connectivity, but since the crappy ISP router is still the main gateway for the subnet, I'm guessing it (bungles) the multicasts? Using your own modem instead of your ISP isn't so much a thing as getting exactly zero access to major electronics retailers for "DOCSIS". Importing one rated for modern broadband would probably set me back between $200-300, that's way too much for something that may not even help. What are my options here and can I at least identify what is going wrong? If the router is to blame, what chance do I have to get things working?