Vodafone Connect Router - Replacement

[devizes]

Hi

I found brand new Vodafone Routers from a UK seller for £6 including delivery.

I thought that I could buy one to have as a spare in case mine dies one of these days.

Should I expect it to work out of the box or do I need to set it up to work with my account?

BT routers just work as I remember when I was with BT.

Comments please?

regards

C

[BandOfBrothers]

Hi,

Frim a past post on here they said that Cust service advised the router is latched to a particular broadband account so wouldn't work on other broadband accounts. 

[Nabs]

@devizes i'd be very surprised if the router just works. You would very likely need to have it configured or you account by Vodafone. 
Yous current router will be covered under warranty for the duration of your broadband contract so if anything goes wrong with it you should get it replaced/repaired fairly quickly. With that in mind there shouldn't really be a need to have a spare to be honest + i'm not sure i'd trust someone selling a piece of hardware that would usually retail nearer the £100 mark

[devizes]

thank you for the heads-up guys, much appreciated

[Enceladus]

My fibre BB was recently connected. The supplied Connect router absolutely refused to authenticate although there was sync. So I had to phone support. After some persistence and three and half hours it transpired that the login credentials in the router I had been supplied with did not agree with those recorded on the system for my account, although the router serial did agree. 

Incidentally the support representative also refused to let me have the credentials so I could use my own router. They were also very reluctant to help as they wanted me to wait till midnight to see would the problem fix itself.

From which I conclude that another Connect router won't work unless support determine the credentials in the router and update your account accordingly.

[devizes]

Hi all,

In the meantime I have taken the plunge and bought 2 still sealed routers at very low cost.

As expected both didn’t work on my account.

In fact even if you get one from Vodafone via official ways it won’t work out of the box. These routers seem at the moment to have a firmware version 5.4.8.1.160.13.75 in its vanilla state, hence not working on anyone’s account.

The only way to get it working is to have its serial number associated to one’s account.

I called Voda customer service where they did that and explained the above.

As soon as it is connected it starts handshaking with the Vodafone systems and gets configured to your account.

Whilst the router was updating I started producing configuration files and checking if I could see it being populated with my account details… and it worked….

I was more concentrated on the part where “@broadband.vodafone.co.uk” is seen. There are 4 instances of the username in the XML file. Counting from above, in the file, the 3rd one was changed to my username, the other 3 didn’t, at least I didn’t manage to capture other instances of the config files as the router rebooted and came back with the new firmware that generates the config files as CCF and these are encrypted.

What I also found out is that with firmware 5.4.8.1.160.13.75 the config file that is generated isn’t accepted by the restore process. The file it produces is a XML, but it complains that it wants a CCF format. How dumb could they when they have created that version? If I use the CCF produced by the newer software version it also doesn’t work as it is encrypted and at no time the restore process requests the password I used when producing it.

If it did work my hopes where that I take the config file of the router that is registered and load it with the config file that I got off the working one. Having said this it would likely still not work as its serial number isn’t registered.