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.

[csiwek]

Just chatted to them and they've said:

"Okay that's not a problem at all, as stated in the Terms and Conditions we can provide you with these particular credentials however your router needs to have the 'CE' marking for us to be able to provide this information to you."

They have asked to send pictures of router I want to use

So, things go in the right direction....

[Soofla]

I will be going live with Vodafone on November 1st. I'm obviously reading a few threads here and there about issues with the Vodafone router.

I do NOT use the built-in wireless on any ISP supplied kit - I instead use a Ubiquity wireless access point which is....stunning to say the least.

So I'm assuming I can disable the wireless on the Vodafone router?

Also, other than the wireless problems, it's otherwise quite solid?

[displaced]

Well, I managed to get my details via Live Chat.  Very inconsistent of Vodafone!  But still, nice to have.

Having used the Vodafone box for a couple of weeks, here's my observations:

• Sync speeds are consistently ~10MBit/sec lower than the Huawei Openreach modem from BT.  Everything else is identical -- I even used the same cable between the VF box and the phone socket.
• Connection drops happen nightly.  Sometimes 3-4 drops per day.
• Once dropped, the box takes up to 10 minutes to reconnect.  Sync is quite fast, but getting the PPPoE up and getting an IP address assigned takes a huge amount longer than BT.  The whole process on BT (Openreach modem, Airport Extreme router) took about a minute.
• The VF box has keyhole holes for wall mounting at the top-rear.  However, these are useless since the box has a non-removable foot sticking out at the bottom-rear.  Do not expect to wall-mount the router neatly.
• The VF box serves up a 'reconnect' page if the link drops.  This has the fantastic side-effect of my web browser having a Vodafone icon stored as the favicon for any pages I tried to visit during downtime.
• The 'reconnect' page doesn't have any 'no-cache' values set, so my browser would display the cached 'reconnect' page even when the connection was up.
• DHCP can be disabled on the latest firmware.  I used the box as a simple modem/router upstream of my Airport Extreme. However, in this configuration, the Vodafone box is still the network's router -- so port forwarding (manual or uPNP-triggered) takes place on that box.
• The VF box cannot be used with a separate modem.  The "This port is not in use" sticker over the WAN ethernet port really is telling the truth.
• The web interface is pretty unoffensive.  Shows a good amount of info and is logically organised.  
• If you're running an internal web server on the HTTPS port (tcp/443) and using DDNS to obtain a hostname pointing to your connection, you won't be able to reach that server via the DDNS hostname internally.  For example, if example.ddns.com points to your Vodafone IP address, https://example.ddns.com/ will work OUTSIDE your home, but not inside.  You'll need to use the server's internal IP.
• Talking of IP addresses:  you'll get a new one every time you start a new PPPoE session (for me, several times a day).  You'll need to have ddclient or similar running to update your DDNS records.  Do not expect BT-like PPPoE sessions that last weeks.  In two weeks, the longest unbroken PPPoE session I saw on Vodafone was about 16 hours.

[Soofla]

OK, tahnk you for your report.

What that is telling me of course is "thank god we get a 30 day trial period" with Vodafone.

After having 74mb sync speed with both BT & TalkTalk, having any less with Vodafone would be unacceptable. 64mb will not be an accepted sync speed.

Anything less than 19mb upload will also be disapointing.

Restarts. My current Talk Talk router has an uptime of around 5 months and the connection up time is around 45 days.

Daily reconnections will be unacceptable.

So if I start experiencing the issues you describe, and it'll be soon after connection if I do, then we'll have to think again after 30 days.

[Alexus]

From my experience, remember every setup is unique, I got very good sync speeds in the very high 70Mb/s range with the Vodafone router however actual speed tests were in the area of 35Mbps for a 76Mb/s service. On top of that I run 3 gigabit switches and about 30 wired devices only using Cat 6 cabling, all of which seemed to confuse the hell out of the router such that I never got more than 10Mbps on my home network - when it worked, which was hardly ever. Hence for me the Vodafone router was not fit for purpose my devices were offline most of the time.

On my replacement Netgear I get a slightly lower sync speed in the low to mid 70Mb/s range, but very fast speed test also around that level. Data in my home network is now 100's of Mb/s depending on the device.

[displaced]

That sounds pretty horrendous!

In my usage of the VF box, at least I didn't have my LAN traffic passing through it.  I'd disabled all DHCP and WiFi and simply connected my primary Airport router's WAN socket to a VF LAN port.  So all local stuff stayed on my own known-good kit.  

Like you, I've got a rather elaborate home network -- a few gigabit switches, 28 clients (I've counted recently!) with about a 70/30 split between wireless and wired.  I run a local DNS server with an internal '.home' DNS zone and a caching resolver pointing at Google's public DNS and internal DHCP.

I use an iperf3 service on my home server to test throughtput between hosts.  Across the wired LAN, I routinely get close to the theoretical max. for gigabit ethernet -- and that continued after setting up the VF box 'outside' of my primary Airport.

Now I've got my PPPoE details, I'll be digging out the reliable Openreach Huawei modem.  I'm wondering if my slower sync speed can be explained by the VF box not supporting G.INP/vectoring (conjecture, at the moment).    

[beastofbaslow]

Vodafone seem to have done a 180 on this daft policy. I refused downright to become a broadband customer unless I could use my Draytek 2860. They initially point-blank refused (see earlier posts) to give me the log in info however a re-application yesterday said "no problem". Based on that, I signed up and I am about to transfer from BT. 

I don't mind paying (delivery) for their router which will stay in the cupboard unless I am entirely convinced that there is a line problem in which case I'll use it diagnostically and let them do their diagnostic stuff with it.

I'm glad they saw sense because I know at least three people who refused to become voda broadband customers based on this t &c.

[displaced]

Let's hope it stays this way!

I'm now set up with my Openreach HG612 modem and my AirPort Extreme. Speeds have not increased yet, but the stats from the modem indicate a good connection -- I expect the profile to rise over the next few weeks, especially when the cab realises G.INP can be enabled.

A few things I've noticed already:

• The Openreach modem syncs just as quickly as it did when I was with BT.
• The AirPort Extreme establishes a PPPoE session and obtains an IP address almost as quickly as it did with BT.  From a cold start of the modem, the internet connection is up and running in just over a minute, versus ~10 mins for the Vodafone router.
• Pings are lower, even if speeds are the same for the moment.

Anyway.  I'm very pleased to be back using kit I can trust, monitor and maintain.  I'll get the LAN2 port of the HG box connected up to my switch tonight so I can get some automated stat monitoring/graphing up and running.  Nice!

[displaced]

Oh, and here's something interesting:

My AirPort Extreme has picked up a routable IPv6 WAN address!  My laptop has in turn picked up an IPv6 on the same prefix.  

It's a public 6-to-4 gateway, but it's something

[146]

My sync speed is also 10MBit slower than my previous ISP, I think it may be the high SNR  it seems to stick to.