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Own router on Vodafone GigaFast

fraggsta

Member
I'm currently on Virgin 350 Mb. I get about 380 Mb and no drops in speed at any time of day or night. The connection I get from them is good but I'm starting to want something faster and Virgin won't offer me 500 Mb/s or 1 Gb. CityFibre have been through my part of Leeds laying cables in the last 6 months and my discounted price from Virgin is ending in August so I'm thinking of leaving and going onto Vodafone. The Vodafone website assures me I can get Gigafast and that it will be 900 Mb/s.

I intend to use my own router, a Linksys WRT3200ACM running OpenWRT (Lede). I use several VLANs on my network, specify static IPs for various things through DHCP and run my own VPN on the connection, and I have a genuine need to be able to VPN into my own LAN from outside.

My house isn't actually right next to the road. I am about 50 metres from the nearest road, and have to walk down a footpath to get to one. I only ever saw CityFibre engineers laying cables along the road. I know that the Vodafone checker says I can get Gigafast, but can they actually get a connection to me? How will this be done if my house isn't right next to a road. Virgin apparently has copper cables going down these footpaths, but I don't know how this would be done on a CityFibre connection.

Can I use my own router with Gigafast? I've seen some posts suggesting it's possible but it's not really clear. Is there a modem only mode for the router that Virgin will give me? What kind of port into the house will I get, does a CityFibre connection result in an ethernet cable into the house or something else? I've seen some posts online suggesting it is possible, but many of them seem to refer to previous Vodafone products which would be delivered via different technology, using a different router etc.

I have an Intel Atom D510M0 board running pfsense. I might consider using this or getting a more powerful small computer to run pfsense or more likely opnsense. Does anyone know whether this will work with Vodafone Gigafast? Has someone got it working with pfsense/opnsense?

Lastly, do people recommend Vodafone Gigafast? I've heard very mixed opinions about it.
 
1. If Cityfibre haven’t dug up your street then they’ll use existing ducts or poles (eg Openreach infrastructure) for the connection from their green FTTP cabinet to your home. I wouldn’t worry too much about their external deployment; if Vodafone say you can get their Gigafast service then you can.

2. Cityfibre will run fibre into your home terminating at an ONT. You simply hook up your router to the RJ45 port on the ONT. Though if using your own router then you will need to setup a PPPoE on your router and use it on a VLAN Id=911, which is standard on all Cityfibre FTTP lines. If you use your own router then you will need to get the PPPoE login credentials from VF.
 
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A quick update on this topic. I got Cityfibre provided internet access through Virgin. After installing it, I eventually managed to get my own router working with VLAN ID 911. It took some convincing to get Vodafone's support to give me the PPPoE login details. At first they told me I could only use my own router if I lived in Milton Keynes :ROFLMAO:, I guess their support person quickly googled it and read the forum post of someone in that area getting it working. It's a good connection, I pretty consistently get 939 Mb download and 650 Mb upload on speedtests. Stuff like torrents and even downloads from Steam seem to mysteriously slow down at times, so I suspect Vodafone is traffic shaping these. Might try using a VPN to see if that changes the behaviour.
 
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Virgin media are using city fibre provided infrastructure to supply gigabit broadband? That cant be right surely?
 
I'm using a Ubiquity ER-X running OpenWRT as a router for Vodaphone 500M FTTP (albeit on an Openreach fibre, so it doesn't need the VLAN 911 setting which is a CityFibre thing). Have separate mesh wifi each with wired backhall. Works really well. Only downside from not using the Vodafone router is I don't have the automatic failover to the backup 4G dongle but if it really does go down I can get switch over quickly enough.
 
I'm using a Ubiquity ER-X running OpenWRT as a router for Vodaphone 500M FTTP (albeit on an Openreach fibre, so it doesn't need the VLAN 911 setting which is a CityFibre thing). Have separate mesh wifi each with wired backhall. Works really well. Only downside from not using the Vodafone router is I don't have the automatic failover to the backup 4G dongle but if it really does go down I can get switch over quickly enough.
Depending on what router you have, setting up automatic failover to 4G might still be possible, e.g. I have a TP-Link Archer C7 v5, which has a USB socket on the back, which I plug my 4G dongle into (with the appropriate drivers installed in OpenWRT). I run OpenWRT with MWAN3 configured to fall back to 4G if the main connection fails, so this should be automatic, just as it would be if I was using the Vodafone router.
 
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