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Firstly these do not currently appear on the Openreach approved list however Plusnet also only allow approved routers and were happy with the Synology ones. They are approved but the list isn't up to date.
This is just in case someone has or wants one of these routers and wanted to know if it will work with Vodafone broadband and how to configure it. Hopefully the tags will make finding the post easy in future.
Like everything on the Synology routers this is really easy. You don't need to mess with VLANs etc.... All you need to do is enter your username and password as below.
You will need an Openreach modem, these don't have a modem built in. Either an Openreach modem or 3rd Party vDSL modem will do. The modem has no configuration, it just decodes the signal. Some routers have one built in.
1. Plug the ethernet cable from the modem into the Synology routers WAN port (LAN port 1 if you're load balancing internet like I do).
2. Open the Network Center and select Internet.
3. Under Connection change the type to PPPoE.
4. Enter your username and password.
5. That's it you will be up and running.
6. Optional: Configure some manual DNS servers, I have the Google ones configured as pictured.
Performance: The overall speed will be about the same. Some may state that they got a faster speed but if you disconnect and reconnect the Vodafone router it will negotiate different speeds each time. Sometime slightly better and other slightly worse. The biggest improvement isn't overall speed, it's latency. My latency dropped from 11ms to 5-6ms. This is more important than speed for general internet browsing. Downloading large items use larger packets and don't need to make loads of small requests so it will make no difference to that. When you browse a website though you will be connecting to the website and 10-20 other addresses because of how adverts work and links to other sites. Most of these connections will first need to query DNS which is a small request. Lots of small requests benefit massively from better latency. Also gaming will be better but I won't go into that. Latency is usually impacted by the performance of the router so I wouldn't expect everyone to get the same level of latency as I get. I use the RT2600ac and Vodafone with 200Mbps Virgin so I get 254Mbps download and 40Mbps upload where multithreaded connections are allowed.
