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Using the dongle on a stalled Gigafast Pro install.

Delicolor
3: Seeker
3: Seeker

Hi, I was due to get FTTH fibre installed last Thursday but CityFibre were unable to blow the fibre all the way from my house to their street cab. (It made it 60m which cleared the first street chamber but was obstructed beyond, presumably still in Openreach ducts. It seems it is a partial blockage as air was making it to the street cab). A second crew arrived on Friday but left after an hour or two.

 

All my internals are complete (with the service and broadband lights off on the fibre box of course) and fortunately Sky haven’t ceased my FTTC service so I still have broadband and dialtone.

 

However not knowing when service will stop, I connected via admin to my new Vodafone router to see if the automatic fallback to 4G was working and it wasn’t, the dongle was making no attempt to connect (although the status showed 1 USB connection).

 

The USB dongle works fine in a laptop, with healthy speeds to the internet (but higher ping time, which is to be expected). Now does the Giga Pro router need an initial config update it receives on first successful connect to configure the dongle or is there some tweak I can do?  The router has factory settings.

 

(If my old Sky service goes before the fibre is lit up I will of course call the Vodafone WiFi Xperts team.)

 

18 REPLIES 18

Cynric
16: Advanced member
16: Advanced member

From https://www.vodafone.com/news/press-release/vodafone-super-wifi-banishes-broadband-blackspots it says

"... the Super WiFi network is managed by the cloud", well what a load marketing rhubarb. "The cloud" is somebody else's facilities management hosting environment. Fair enough the cloud promises a bit more than traditional FM, but here it's being mentioned as if it is some wonder panacea. If the automation software works fine and if it doesn't there's no manual over-ride. It will be interesting to watch as more customers join the "pro" plan.

Well I am now activated after a large number of Kelly & Fibrenet vans turned up. The supervisor talked to me at length explaining that the regular guys aren’t fibre splicers, they effectively blow in connectorised suitable lengths after measuring the duct run. The hitch was at the tee points from shared ducts to Fibrenet ducts. Anyway, I walked the dog and when I got back I had four green lights on the GPON. The router appears to have had a firmware tweak (or config lockdown) as I can no longer see the WAP setup area but the USB dongle is now recognised and made use of (but not instantly) if I disconnect the WAN cable.  I do seem to be mostly getting the 100 Meg up & down speeds from the fibre although I was warned that it would take a couple of hours to settle down whilst engineering tweaked things. 

When the fibre was pulled, it looked like the super-WiFi booster may have stopped communicating but I didn’t spend too much time investigating that.

Jayach
16: Advanced member
16: Advanced member

@Delicolor wrote:

The router appears to have had a firmware tweak (or config lockdown) as I can no longer see the WAP setup area


Can you say what firmware version is it now running?

It is Firmware 19.2.0307-3261019. I found the WAP settings again, I was mistaken about them not being there any more. I didn’t note the firmware as received.

Jayach
16: Advanced member
16: Advanced member

Thanks for that info. That is the same firmware I have on one of my THG3000's (they sent me a second one during fault finding) so there is no specific firmware for Pro.

So Pro is a Huwaei dongle and 50 Gig allowance ( valid 3 years or so, but topped up on demand).

 

Judging from my being unable to get it working before the fibre was lit up it may well only enable if credentials permit though.

Jayach
16: Advanced member
16: Advanced member

@Delicolor wrote:

So Pro is a Huwaei dongle and 50 Gig allowance ( valid 3 years or so, but topped up on demand).

 


And up to 3 WiFi boosters with the ability to leave penalty free if you don't get at least 10Mbs over WiFi at your furthest device. (can't remember where I read the 10Mbs figure)

Rhubarb is the polite term! I think marketing jumped on the buzzword there. Any IT savvy person will know that the cloud has its place and has scalability/deployment benefits but makes little difference to the people not actually directly supporting it (until they find it becomes almost unusable when another apparently unrelated customer suffers a massive Denial Of Service attack at your hosted data centre) 

I suspect the portfolio has been tweaked to counter the BT marketing of “Unbreakable hybrid WiFi backed up by EE”.