WARNING - If you need Sure Signal and are going to fibre, READ THIS!

[Landshark2007]

I will try not to get too techy over this, but shortly speaking, if you are about to upgrade your Internet connection from copper to fibre, and you use a Sure Signal, you are about to enter a world of pain.

Bottom line is that Vodafone Sure Signals need very specific settings in order to work. One of these settings is specific to how the Sure Signal expects to see the broadband service. ALL Sure Signals use PPPoA to set up their service between the box in your home and the server at Vodafone. When you are migrated from copper-based broadband to fibre-based broadband, the protocol changes from PPPoA to PPPoE and your Sure Signal will stop working. 

As it currently stands, there is no work-around from Vodafone although I am sure that in the fullness of time a product may come forth that can work, or Vodafone may make some internal changes. Either way, with the roll-out of fibre by BT to various parts of the UK, If you use any femtocell (the techncial name for Sure Signals and other such devcies) then you are likely to run into this head on. 

Right now, I am still working with others to try and get some kind of fix, but so far nothing has come forward. Please don't be lulled into a false sense of hope by following the technical support processes for resetting the boxes etc. If PPPoE is being used, nothing you do will make a blind bit of difference and you will save yourself hours of wasted time. 

Right now, PPPoE kills off Sure Signal use - end of story.

[Nabs]

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Landshark2007 wrote:

Why they could not leave the copper stuff running? A good question, but probably is based on the single router at my end of the network. 

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Given that you need an entirely new fibre line run out to the house, I don't understand why they couldn't have just treated it as if it were a second copper line... If they did there would have been no interruption oin your existing broadband connection.
I assume the older copper line is it's still there to servce the POTS network?

The IP address issue could have been worked around by routing your old IP to your new one (and the other way) so traffic to either IP address would reach the same endpoint, ie your property

It's a shame abvout the service, unfortunately itr seems to the the regular story from all big companies these days.

Just out of interest @Landshark2007 what area of the country are you in? I wasn't aware of any widespread upgrades to FTTP  so it's be intereesting to know where they are focussing.

[Landshark2007]

UPDATE: Quite a lot to get in here so I will qualify my original thread.

1) You do not need to worry about PPPoE or PPPoA this was misinformation given to me at the outset. So ignore what I said in the original posting.

2) FttP is VERY different to FttC to explain, the difference is whether you are getting fibre to the (C)abinet (the little green box either in the road or on a telepgraph pole etc) or directly from the exchange to the (P)remises. This equates to whether or not you actually have fibre cable coming into your premises or if you are still using copper. 

3) Fibre service does NOT port over all settings from copper and this is the VITAL aspect that causes all the problems. If you have FttP installed you will have your BT Hub and another box that acts as a fibre transceiver between the fibre and the BT Hub. There are a host of port fowarding entries that you need to add to the hub, but none of this will work until BT sorts out the back office network changes that must happen to make the whole lot come to life. In this case, the hub changes and all the work between the exchange and the premises had been done, but none of the back office work had been completed which meant that the Sure Signal could not establish a VPN tunnel between itself and the Vodafone servers - hence it sitting like a white doorstop for the last two weeks. 

4) So what needs to be done to make it work (FttP only)?

Step 1: Carried out bt BT Openreach. This takes the fibre from the manifold or exchange and brings it to a small box mounted on the external aspect of your home/office. Typically this work takes between two and six hours to complete. Before the engineer leaves, they will have ensured that a proper optical signal is being received at the premises box on the wall. 

Step 2: Carried out by BT Openreach. Working backwards (from inside to out) the engineer will mount another box, (in my case a Huawei EchoLife HG8240 GPON Terminal) with a small UPS box that will keep the Huawei running in the event of a power failure, inside your premises that is near to your router. The maximum distance that the internal fibre can run is 30m and it must not have any sharp bends in the run. Once all the splicing is done and the signal is verified, your copper xDSL cable is removed from the hub and an ethernet cable is connected between the FOT and the HUB. 

Step 3: Carried out by BT Network Services or yourself. This is where things fell into a rather large hole. The Vodafone Sure Signal needs to have certain ports forwarded if the service is to stand any chance of working, I will post these later. These entries need to be added to your BT Hub (or chosen router). You will also have to identify your Sure Signal in the DHCP list to ensure that you target the port forward settings correctly. Either BT can do this via remote control, or you can do it yourself.

Step 4: Carried out by BT Network Services. BT needs to ensure that VPN tunnels can be created between your hub/router and Vodafone's servers. No one else can do this job and it is pivotal if you are to get any service at all. Once you get a confirmation that the back-office work has been done, you need to deregister your Sure Signal on Vodafone's web page and re-register it. This is because the external IP address assigned by BT will have changed. IP addresses (static or dynamic) come from different networks within BT. You cannot port a copper-based IP address to a fibre-based service (yeah, I know). 

Other technical bits:

Port forwarding (usually found in the advanced settings of the hub/router)

Ports (Any): 8, 50, 53

Ports (UDP): 67, 68, 123, 500, 4500, 33434 - 33445

You also need to add the PPTP server service to the port forwarding list.

Port clamping is NOT necessary if you get the port forwarding correct.

How to check if things are going awry.

This is a bit of a dark art as there is so little public domain information, but this may help. This relates to the Sure Signal v1 only.

The four LEDs on the front of a SS1 I will refer to as 1 (top) to 4 (bottom). In normal operation, LEDs 1, 2 and 4 should be steady. LED 3 will flash if a mobile device is being used. 

During start up, the LEDs do the following:

LED 1 on. 

Momentarily, LEDS 1 through to 4 will flash in turn before LED 1 stays on. 

Now, this is the bit where you need to concentrate:

At the back of the SS1 is the LAN port. Watch the traffic indicator (yellow) because this will go through a load of send requests to establish a link to the Vodafone servers. Nothing else will tell you what is going on, so please don't try unless you have access to a LAN Analyser. This flashing will go on for approximately 40 to 60 seconds on a fibre link before you will start to see LED 4 start to flash slowly. If LED 4 does not come on, the SS1 cannot establish a secure link to the Vodafone server and it will not try to go any further. Although the traffic LED on the LAN port will continue to flash at random, this is normal behaviour for any device on an ethernet network and does not signify anything of any value. If the SS1 cannot get to the point where LED 1 is steady and LED 4 starts to flash steadily, the SS1 will not be able to work properly. My advice, switch it off and wait for BT to get back to you. 

There is also a 'gotcha' waiting for those people with SS1s that have been in service for some time. If you have not turned off your SS1 in ages and this is your first time, you may encounter the "dying PSU" fault. This is usually demonstrated as LED1 coming on, then the four flashing in sequence before LED1 lights and LED4 starts to flash steadily. LED 2 then joins in before the whole thing then seems to start all over again. This will go on ad nauseam until you switch it off. This is a PSU issue that requires you to go to any auction or sales site and buy a new PSU (you cannot get one from Vodafone). Just ensure that it has the right voltage, polarity and current rating (get a slightly higher one to make sure) and this fault should go away.

I hope that this helps people moving to fibre.

Good luck and I will answer any questions that I can.

[Nabs]

Fantastic post @Landshark2007 Loads of really useful information in there! :smileyhappy:

Ultimately then your issue was down to BT not completing their VPN setup correctly at their end, I wonder how many other people will get caught out with this as time goes on.

[Landshark2007]

Sadly, I think there will be a lot of FUD for the next few months as the roll-out of this service takes hold. 

For FttP installations, this is a real headache as there are so many places that the process can fall over where you have no control or visibility. The C20 network (BT's copper-based network) and C21 network (the new fibre stuff) coexists in the exchanges and can cause massive bandwidth issues for those left on the copper systems. Add into this that the BT network routing configutaion needs to be tweaked in order for any changes made to become affective and I think you have the recipe for a very big customer/supplier clash. 

It seems as though the customers on FttC are less likely to be hit as the impact on the customers' equipment is substantially less. They get a new faceplate and that's it. 

[Nabs]

Last I knew there was still only trial roll outs of FTTP so hopefully they will iron out these sort of issues by the time mass roll out she commence (not that I expect that anytime soon)

Where about in the country are you @Landshark2007

[Landshark2007]

I'm in that sticky-out-bit on the bottom left of the UK. Cornwall or "Wherethe'ellisthatthen" to use it's English title. We are also known as the Land that Time Couldn't Care About or "Cameron's Retreat" although the latter may become redundant if the June referendum goes against him. 

FttP is very new for a lot of people. There are also a lot of things that can derail an installation very badly. These are things such as distance between the fibre run and the premises, distance to manifold, underground services, distance between public land and private land, availability of BT trained engineers. A simple thing like the fibre duct being on the opposite side of the road to the premises can incur heavy four-figured costs for ductwork to simply allow the service to come in the first place. To give you an idea, the original order was placed in October 2015. The survey was completed in the same month, but it took until February 2016 for the first part of the process to be completed and another three weeks after that for the actual installation to be done in the premises. After that it took two weeks for the back office work to be undertaken in BT and even this was hit-or-miss so it has huge scope for any project to be seriously hampered if any aspect of the process is either misunderstood or simply forgotten. There were also aspects of this installation that were totally unique and will have implications for many other installations going forward.