Vodafone Home Broadband / Vodafone Connect

[dynamick]

Hi there. Firstly the speeds and setup on my broadband have been great, so has most of the customer support I have had with initial gremlins on setup

I do have two big headaches though. I have a zyxcel nsa325 network drive which I store music, photos, movies etc on and On my old plusnet modem I just plugged it in the ethernet port and my Hitachi tv saw it. Now although the drive is visible through my PC and is visible wordlessly on the home network, the drive is not seen by my TV *unless the drive is plugged directly into the the ethernet port on the TV. So what setting am missing, there is no help or suggestions on the net, with it being a new modem there is no firmware 6 for it either.

Secondly, when I signed up for vodafone home broadband I was told that I would get 10 email addresses too, I have no idea where they are or indeed the pop/imap.plus.net settings for the addresses or the settings so I can send emails on my current email address.

Hope someone can help and thanks in advance

Mick

[tigerdriver]

ok i connected to NAS to a switch rather than directly to the router and now it works just fine again 

Thank you vodafone support for wasting ages just to tell me to a) switch it on and off and b) to call WD as it must be their fault 

[chrisb84]

How about this then. I can't try this because my Vodafone Connect Router is basically sat as a dumb modem in front of another e3000 dd-wrt router.

Try connecting it back into the Vodafone Connect Router then in the settings turn the firewall off. I wouldn't recommend doing this for long just to test. Maybe the built in firewall is impacting communication between devices connected on the router.

If it works with the firewall disabled then it might need a NAT configuring for the internal communication which we can figure out if actually required. I've been working on some virtual firewall stuff recently that uses interface based rules rather than networks so devices on the same network can be hidden from each other.

[chrisb84]

Hi all.

For anyone else who finds this question this is what I have found. It is a bug and Vodafone need to resolve it in firmware.

The Vodafone Connect Router broadcasts on your network as a DLNA server called Vodafone Station. It seems to be called this because in other countries like Italy they use the same/similar router but call it a Vodafone Station.

When connecting a device that uses a DLNA server to send media to other devices like your TV, Amp or games console to the router directly it will not work. You may not be aware that your devices uses DLNA but it probably does just like the mentioned devices in this thread. Check your manufacturers details and look for the DLNA logo, if it's there then this is the problem.

Your TV, Amp and games console act as a DLNA client and scan the network for DLNA servers which they would normally pick up however the router is not passing the DLNA requests between the built in network ports. Instead it responds back with it's own DLNA server called Vodafone Station. The DLNA server it uses is called Twonky. There appears to be an option to disable this in the Vodafone Connect Router interface but disabling it does not actually turn it off. It remains on and discoverable. For those that have said they can still access the content from a PC the reason is that you're using a different method of connectivity, not DLNA. Most likely SMB.

The permenant solution is for Vodafone to fix this in a firmware upgrade.

The temporary fix as mentioned by others is to buy a cheap switch, you can pick them up for £10 or less. Connect the switch to the Vodafone Connect Router then connect all your devices to switch instead. If your TV uses wifi and isn't cabled to the switch you may find this still doesn't work.

I found no settings tinkering works for this problem. This is a consumer grade product so most users expect to be able to plug and play without the need for any knowledge of how it actually works. You buy these devices and plug them in and they should work, you shouldn't need to know how DLNA works etc... In this case the bug isn't acceptable and should be fixed.

The tech team needs to flag this with the product development guys.

[ChrisOX33]

Hi Chris.

Thanks for posting your findings, this has been driving me mad!

Vodafone:  I assume that you will be releasing a firmware update to address this problem?

Thanks again.

[DaveCD]

@ChrisOX33 and @chrisb84

There's been some great work shown here and I've passed this on for further investigations.

[ChrisOX33]

All,

Another update which I have been meaning to post - if you are connecting your TV or other equipment via PowerLine adaptors (in my case TP-LINK TL-PA251) to your Vodafone Connect router the NAS still isn't visible.  To get everything working you will need to connect the PowerLine adaptor to the same switch as the NAS, not the router.

Thanks,

Chris

[tonymackie]

There was an announcement that this issue would be fixed in February, but since thern there has been no update from Vodafone when we will be able to get full use from our wireless networks. Any information would be useful.

Thanks

[WillVXR]

I originally posted the problem (4th post) and workaround in this thread yet we are still awaitng a resolution and a rebate for spending out on a switch to circumvent Vodafone Router shortcomings.

[gkizilis]

I can attest that this has solved my problem also. Thank you for your suggestion!

[WillVXR]

This is an interesting thread but it is unfortunate that we all have to buy extra equipment (In my case an 8 port Gigabit switch) in order to use a  Vodafone modem/router in the way it was intended to work out of the box.

I would like to see a resolution (Hardware change or firmware update) and a rebate for the purchase of switches that should not even be needed..