Vodafone connect router DHCP settings

[mattman]

I have posted this into off topic as I can not see any reference to Vodafone Home phone and Broadband.

I have install the router and all is working but there one thing that is missing from the setting of the VDSL router that being a function to turn off DHCP, I have for the pasted 10 year had my own network running at home with a fully working server that is my DHCP & DNS server but for the first time in history I have just sign up for 18 month and got a bloody router that has no function in the GUI settings pages to turn OFF the DHCP server. So for now I will have to wait for 18 months before I can change ISP. thanks vodafone tech team for missing this one. If there is anyone out there that can offer me a firmware update to give me the function to turn OFF DHCP then please post it.

[Alexus]

@Tom, @Carly

You state that Vodafone do not support 3rd party equipment. This is ambiguous, please can you check Vodafone's current stance on this as I read it one of two ways:

1. Vodafone, going forward, will not allow any 3rd-party CPE to be connected to the fixed-line broadband network, the supplied equipment must be used.

2. Vodafone will not support the use of 3rd-party CPE on the fixed-line broadband network, such an item could be connected but there will be no support offered from that point.

[brutos08]

Saying Vodafone doesn't support third party equipment is incorrect they just don't want the hassle of losing out of the modem fee fair engine if uses what to use their own kit and you still want you cash from the modem they am absolutely certain people which want to use their own router will pay for your inadequate router and use theirs without requesting support from you

[brutos08]

I will say your service so far has been green for me two weeks constant sync at 79887kbps now at 79999kbps which is better than plusnet which am coming from

[csiwek]

I am also more than happy. seems much more stable with HG612. My IP hasn't changed since Nov25

[Soofla]

Once again I've failed to get my details.

So once again I find myself having ot blitz live chat, phone and writing more letters.

Not going to take this ##~## lying down VF - ##~## joke.

[albertlionheart]

Live chat for broadband support has been disappeared - the link on the website no longer exists. I have a number of formal complaints lodged with them about this and the way they treat their so - called customers.

The only option for me is to call 08080 034 515 - I can't call the helpline on the mobile network as I have no signal here.

It's all a pile of wotsits.

[lyonsj400]

@ Soofla  - ROFL!!

That is how I've felt for the last two weeks. Resigned now mate...

Dear Vodafone,

Give us our PPPoE details or else give us a better router, or else let us use our own routers. WHAT?? You're not gonna do any of those three? Then I'll make sure that friends and family DON'T switch to Vodafone broadband because of the S**T customer service, and yes, it is S**T - as confirmed by OFCOM.

[slippy62]

Story and key learnings about fixing the Vodafone Connect DHCP server capacity issues.  Long story, but done so anyone in my position can relate their situation to mine.  I hope it is useful for someone out there.

...

I switched to Vodafone Fibre 76 in November 2016; away from BT that to be fair had provided a faultless service for more than a year.  I switched to save money.  My technical knowledge is more than most and boy, did I need it to get through the problems faced with setting up my home network.

I am fortunate to live in a large property - over 9,500 sq/ft set over three floors.  It’s a double lined internal wall structure, and all floors are concrete with underfloor heating (think wire mesh).  Built 8 years ago, it surprisingly missed out on being cabled with Cat 5e.  The gardens are a little over 2 acres.  I am the sort of individual that needs Wifi everywhere I go; particularly at home.  My needs aren’t that unusual - I think I represent a pretty normal ‘dad’ who has an ever demanding ‘data hungry’ family.

In short, we are severe users of the internet.  We consume anything between 350 - 550 Gigbytes per month.  This comes from all manner of activities - everyday app updates on 4 iPhones, 4 iPads and 6 Windows workstations account for 40Gb per month alone.

Here is a quick run down of what we have;

7 smartphones

5 tablets

6 laptops/desktops

8 Sonos Play 5’s and 4 Sonos Play 3’s

2Tb NAS

Playstation 4

18 (yes, you heard right) Smart TV’s

A CCTV network with 8 HD cameras (filming in 720p)

When we have guests (with children) the mobile device count goes up - we’ve had 23 phones on the network at one point.

It may sound like a lot - but do your own audit and you’ll be surprised.

Anyway; with my BT setup, I had a Billion VDSL modem router attached to a Powerline network, that used the electrical circuit in the house to carry data to every room in the house that had it’s own Powerline adapter of the cabled and/or wireless variety.  I used TP-Link AV500 devices to achieve this.  I had a single SSID called ‘House’ that meant I could roam the property and my phone would ‘hop’ between wireless nodes.  For static devices, such as TV’s, laptops, NAS drives etc I cabled it in where possible and where Wifi was the only option, the device would generally hook on to the same ‘node’ and stay on it without issue.

My BT fibre credentials were supplied to me by BT so I could leave their HomeHub router in the box, and use my much better, much more reliable Billion router.  Everyone has a favourite, but the key issue here is that I controlled the hardware choice.  This meant I could get a chunky piece of kit that could handle the load.  I’ve also used them at the company I own and it could handle 100 devices on Wifi no problem.

Quite often (as in, more than once a week) the home network would fail.  Either the TP-Link hardware would need power cycling to restore the internet connection, or I would get a confused wireless state where no device could join the network.  There is nothing more annoying than spending an evening restarting all of the Powerlines in sequence; in some cases their settings would be wiped so I was continually up and down the stairs with cables and laptops to re-configure them.

During the entire time of my BT/Billion/TP-Link configuration I was only ever surprised when the internet actually worked.  Add a Sonos system into the mix and it fell over every couple of days.  There were too many things going on; channel conflicts, noisy data lines, roaming IP addresses, DCHP madness - I wasn’t in the business of spending too much time trying to polish a ##~##.  What I wanted was a large WiFi network that worked reliably and could carry all of my devices.  I am asking too much?

A few weeks ago, my BT contract came up for renewal and I decided to go with Vodafone.  I’ll save you the Openreach sob story for another day, but suffice to say I was delayed by three weeks in the switch over, and ended up trailing 400m of Cat5 cable from my house to my neighbour, just to put internet access into our house while we waited.  If you are sat reading this, and have not yet switched to Vodafone - ensure you have contingency in place for when it is delayed, not if it is delayed.  Assume you will be without internet for weeks; and get something sorted so you are not killing yourself speaking to their broadband team, who quite frankly, have no control over installation time or fault resolution.  

On an afternoon in late November, my Vodafone Connect router suddenly ‘lit up’ and I was back on a fibre service.  At the same time, I had sold all of my Powerline adapters and bought all new Apple Airport hardware - 5 Extremes and 3 Expresses if you are interested.  

Some wise a$$ (OK, me Googling it - to try and achieve a single seamless SSID that would allow me to roam on FaceTime through the house) told me to configure them in ‘Bridge Mode’ and this is where my problems really started with the Vodafone Connect box.  

Using the router control panel via a web browser I could see that the internet connection was up and stable, yet the ‘Network’ list was showing a full run down of every single device; around 40 IP addresses had been handed out from the built in DHCP server.  If I got lucky, I would have 2-3 hours of ‘normal internet’ access - I clearly lost Wifi strength and quality as I bridged out to the back of the garden (the speed and signal is roughly halfed on each bridge) but in the main I got coverage whereever I was.  During these golden hours, everything worked - Sonos played, Netflix on any TV, Plex on an iPad etc.

I knew something was up when I kept getting DNS failures on HTTP browsing (that’s normal Google Chrome surfing to you and I) - often I would type in a URL and I’d get nothing and then a timeout screen. Refreshing didn’t work.  On checking the network via the Airport Utility, I could see that everything was up and normal. Was the Vodafone Fibre service down or intermittent?  Not according to the control panel that gave me the ‘Up’ status.  So, I asked myself, what other failure points could there be?  And it turns out, the router itself is a crock of ##~##.  It can’t handle more than 6 or 7 devices (the official party line according to Vodafone is 5 devices !!!).  Loading devices on one by one (as I did) allowed me to isolate the problem precisely.  Any more than 3 iPhones and it dies.  Any more than 3 laptops and it dies.  Any combination of iphones with smart TVs and it dies.  You want to know how long it took me to arrive at these statistics?  Yes, a long time and yes, I am sad.

Now, if you are a divorcee living in a one bed flat with nothing more than an iPhone and a laptop I am sure the router works just fine for you.  But for the rest of the entire population - it’s about 5 devices PER PERSON these days!

I am obviously locked in to Vodafone for a while and there is no point trying to get the Fibre credentials like I had with BT to swap the hardware.  Party line from them: no way.  Until someone hacks the box and provides these details, we have to make do with the piece of junk they so lovingly call ‘Connect’.  

I had to find a way to stop the Vodafone Connect box dishing out IP addresses (this is the DHCP server that’s built in and on by default).  I needed to lean back on the Apple Airports to do the device IP management, and then have all internet traffic routed via the Vodafone hardware.  Here is what I did:

1. I turned off DHCP on the Vodafone Connect box under Settings > IPv4 and then assigned it a static IP address of 192.168.1.1.  
2. I also turned off the Vodafone Wifi SSID so I would only have one Wifi network at the end (from my Apple Network)
3. I cabled my first Airport Extreme to back of the Vodafone Connect box (in port 1)
4. I then configured the first Airport Extreme on my Macbook using Airport Utility to ‘Create a Wireless Network’
5. On the Airport Extreme settings under ‘Network’ > ‘Router Mode’ I stipulated DHCP & NAT.
6. On the Airport Extreme settings under ‘Internet’ > ‘Connect Using’ I chose ‘Static’ and then gave it an IP address of 192.168.1.2, a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0, a router address of 192.168.1.1 (Vodafone box) and a DNS server of 192.168.1.1 (Vodafone box)
7. On all the other Airport Extremes I chose the ‘Extend my wireless network’ and Apple took care of the configuration.
8. Finally, I altered the DNS settings on the Vodafone box to the Google ones - 8.8.8.8 (primary) and 8.8.8.4 (secondary) as I ‘trust’ Google more than Vodafone for reliable and fast DNS services.  And really finally, I ignored the error of ‘Double NAT’ on my Airport Extreme - I have no idea what this is anyway.
9. And voila - it worked.  Now, when I log in to the Vodafone Router it shows me nothing under the ‘Network’ tab and therefore behaves itself.  It thinks it has nothing connected because in reality, it doesn’t.  

My Apple hardware is now doing the heavy lifting, Wifi coverage and data transfer for home cinema etc - all internet traffic goes out and in via one ethernet port, into one Airport Extreme and then out to whatever extension it needs to get to.

So, for those of you that are tearing your hair out at the faulty nature of the Vodafone Connect router; it because you have more than 6 or 7 devices connected and it can’t cope.  To get around this, suck in hard and purchase decent hardware - Apple conveniently announced that they are discontinuing the Airport Extremes now (why?) but it’s probably the best £2k I’ve spent (!) on networking gear.  It works and it’s the price I pay for choosing to live in a big house.  My solution above would work just as well in a meagre 5 bed property too 🙂

[lyonsj400]

Thanks for that explanation. That is a good way to get around the limitations of the Huwaii router that Vodafone supply.

[djbenson]

I was due to have a second line installed by Vodafone next friday (primary line is provided by someone else) with the intention of having both lines feeding into pfSense and utilising the dual WAN feature to give me better concurrent download speeds - having just found this thread, I've cancelled my order and the modem is going back to them tomorrow.

Silly being the UK's only ISP to do this (I'm excluding Sky as you can extract the details from their router, and if you're competent enough to do that you're competent enough to support your own equipment).

I run a complex setup at home and there's no way I'm going to plonk an ISP's router (doing god knows what) in front of my network.

Lost a customer.