I've just been through the pain of the router not working properly. For me it was a complete failure of internet over the LAN ports along with WiFi dropouts. I'd been through L1 support and got to L2, it took 4 days to get there.
I'd seen this thread so when L2 called me back, I basically said I'll get my own router, just give me the password, I know what I'm doing as I've done this before, I'll take responsibility from the connection in my home after my ADSL socket and I'll leave you alone for 17 months. On hold for 30 seconds to get manager approval, comes back confirms username, which I already got from the XML dump and got my 8 digit upper/lower alpha password, which you can only get from them.
Massive kudos to Jeevez for going through the process and showing it all working. As I didn't want to wait for any delivery from buying on line, I left home, went to PC World and got a Netgear D7000, setup similar to Jeevez and I was up and running in a few minutes.
Where does this leave everyone else reading this? If you haven't joined yet, then take note of the experiences in this thread. The supplied Huawei modem/router is good on paper, but if you will be plugging in more than 4 devices over ethernet and/or have more than half a dozen devices on wifi then it’s not going to work. Switches are not a supported configuration, nor is anything else remotely complex apart from the basic of basic with light use.
If you’ve already joined and know what you’re doing, that means you’re happy configuring a modem/router, then call CS and progress the ticket to get through to L2 support, and once you’re there confidently announce that you want to run with your own router configuration and request the username and password to do so. But note that you will get zero support from Vodafone from that point onwards unless you can prove there is a line fault, but you’ll have a decent IP connection on what is a pretty good network.
