Vodafone Connect Router issues

[abates85]

My vodafone broadband was installed today and setting up my home ive come across the following issues.

1. My Laptop connected on the Wifi 5Ghz channel cannot see my Server connected by LAN Cable, if i disable the 5ghz band i can see the server fine but it reduces the functionality of the router.

2. I cannot connect to a device via port forwarding using the external router IP from within the network. however i can access the device from outside the network.

3. My fibre broadband speed is significantly slower (28MB) than the service i was recieving with sky (40MB) even thoughi was promised full (76MB) speed

has anyone else had these issues and can provide assistance ?

[florca]

Removed duplicate post...

[florca]

Removed duplicate post...

Was the Community Bulletin Board software written by the same team who write the Connect Router firmware?? :smileymad:

[florca]

@sirvelo – Yes, with only minimal drama you can now get PPPoE credentials. See this thread for more details:

http://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5/Broadband-Home-Phone/HOW-TO-Use-a-third-party-router-on-Vodafone-VDSL...

The only gotcha is that they may ask what hardware you plan to use, and may only release credentials if you reply that you’re using one of the modems or modem/routers on the “BT Openreach approved” list, which doesn’t contain any of the popular consumer models from the likes of Netgear or TP-Link etc. The list is attached to the second post in this thread:

http://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5/Broadband-Home-Phone/Re-PPPoE-username-amp-password/td-p/2562425

(click the “View more options” arrow to see the attachment link). Worth knowing that Vodafone have no way to know what hardware you’re using, so how you answer is up to you. Other than that, they may also provide a PPoE User ID without the required “ @broadband.vodafone.co.uk “ suffix, and may confuse similar characters in the password (eg numeric 0 with Upper Case O, numeric 1 with lower case L ) so worth getting them to email or live chat your credentials with a copy/paste at both ends.

@mw8523 – A possible solution to at least one of your problems (unable to see wired LAN devices from WiFi) may be a firmware upgrade. I’m running 5.4.8.1.291.1.30.1.19 and multiple WiFi devices on both 2.4 and 5GHz work quite happily with an Ethernet-connected Raspberry Pi running LogitechMediaServer. There were various reports of WiFi/Wired visibility problems on earlier firmware. FWIW I’ve split the 2.4 & 5GHz SSIDs, and disabled all Content Filtering, the Guest WiFi SSIDs and UPnP, but not sure if that made any difference other than keeping things as simple as possible.

 PS... That said, I'd agree that the VF Router isn't great, and really aimed squarely at the basic consumer market, so serious users who need QoS, VLANs etc. probably do need to upgrade to something more capable. As far as I can tell the underlying Huawei hardware is not that bad, but Vodafone seem to have burdened it with horrible firmware. Some time back I downloaded the Open Source bundle which, after some pressure from other users, they had made available and poking around in it revealed a rather creaking mish-mash of conditional code which they've tried to make generic across multiple hardware types in multiple Vodafone markets. As per my earlier post, for my limited requirements it works OK, but if I needed anything more sophisticated (decent VoIP support, QoS, multiple VPN tunnels etc.) I'd either buy a Draytek or maybe something which would run DD-WRT or Tomato well, linked to an Ebay Huawei / Openreach HG612-3B.

[mw8523]

@florca - thanks for your suggestions; I am already on 5.4.8.1.291.1.30.1.19 but still can't vnc to my my raspi when standing to close to the Vodafone router, i.e. when connected to the WiFi of the VF router.  I'm using realVNC which also offers connection via the cloud and this works even when connected to the VF router's WiFi; so the issue is clearly with the router not being able to route traffic from it's WiFi to a wired device on the LAN. Wired LAN to wired LAN works (i.e. when using my access point) and so does WAN to wired LAN (i.e. cloud).

My access point which is wired to the VF router run 2.4 and 5 GHz bands with the 5 GHz being dominant. On my VF route I've switched off the 5GHz WiFi as I mostly use the 5 GHz band on my phone and therefore I have a better chance to connect via my access point which then allows me to connect me to my raspi and other devices without issues.

[MrWhite]

@mw8523, what access point are you using?  The VF router has had an issue with WLAN to LAN communication, especially with access points.  I currently have the wifi turned off on the VF router and use another wifi router, plus an AP both wired to the VF router for wifi.

[mw8523]

@MrWhite - actually, I have 2: a Netgear WAC120  and a Netgear WNDR3700 flashed with OpenWRT and configured as a dumb access point:

WAC120 ------- wired ----- VF router

WNDR3700 ----- wired ----- VF router

[florca]

@mw8523 - Interesting... Has the VF Router divided your Wired and Wireless networks into different subnets and is (not...) routing between them, assigning the WiFi devices via DHCP with addresses from a different subnet to the Wired LAN? If so may be worth trying changing the DHCP setup to assign all addresses from a single /24 and place all devices in this subnet? I'm not currently at the place with the VF Router so can't check how mine is setup...

Can you Ping in either direction? Can you Ping with large packets?

[MrWhite]

@mw8523 - are you able to just turn off the wifi on the VF router and just use the access points?

@florca - I've seen this on my set up (single AP plus VF router) especially when using sonos and roaming back to the VF router, it doesn't find the sonos speakers.  There's some isolation going on between WLAN and LAN.  Wiring another router/access point to the VF router and turning the wifi off on the latter resolves the issue.

[mw8523]

@MrWhite - well, that's exactly the problem and, of course, by switching off the WiFi on the VF router I could "eliminate" the problem of not being able to access my raspi when connected to the VF router; but I need the WiFi on my VF router as otherwise I have a dead spot and as I can access the WAN via WiFi on my VF router I prefer to keep it on.

[mw8523]

@florca - the VF router is the only DHCP server in my network and all devices are on the same subnet.

I can ping both ways on my LAN - here's the output from my iMac to my raspi:

mw$ ping -s 248 raspi
PING raspi (raspi): 248 data bytes
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.577 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.573 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.590 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.654 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.637 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=0.598 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=0.598 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=0.584 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=0.620 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=0.604 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=0.612 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=0.591 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=0.598 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=13 ttl=64 time=0.595 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=14 ttl=64 time=0.629 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=15 ttl=64 time=0.600 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=16 ttl=64 time=0.514 ms
256 bytes from raspi: icmp_seq=17 ttl=64 time=0.621 ms
^C
--- raspi ping statistics ---
18 packets transmitted, 18 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.514/0.600/0.654/0.029 ms
mw$ 

and from my raspi to my iMac:

pi@raspberrypi-3:~ $ sudo ping -s 248 imac
PING imac (imac) 248(276) bytes of data.
256 bytes from imac: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.549 ms
256 bytes from imac: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.531 ms
256 bytes from imac: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.547 ms
256 bytes from imac: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.520 ms
^C
--- imac ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3113ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.520/0.536/0.549/0.030 ms
pi@raspberrypi-3:~ $ 

BTW, I replaced IP adresses with "imac" and "raspi" to make it more readable.

I can also ping WAN addresses from both.