Why do a lot of Altnets require that you use their router?

I sort of get it from a support perspective, but if you have a savvy user, why won't they let you just replace it.

By replace it, I mean replace it, not just put their router into bridge mode, leaving you with 2 devices.

Sometimes it's the physical media is not ethernet - so think Docsis coax or single mode fibre running wave division multiplexing.

Sometimes it's to support their authentication method (although it's usually PPPoE or IPoE now).

Sometimes it's just to make their support teams lives easier, as you say!

It is usually the support approach. How can one small support team offer guaranteed support for all the different combinations and variations of Router out there.

ISP lead connection monitoring is another.

It's possible for some altnets that the fibre terminates directly on their device, i.e. it's a combined router/ONT.

Effectively then you'd be swapping the ONT, which Openreach don't allow either. It breaks the ONT registration - unless your new device is spoofing the original ONT serial number.

It also puts the whole PON at risk, if some badly-designed ONT module is used that could interfere with other users on the same splitter.

Probably because they can. I don't think the TBB community is typical of users in general - the majority are probably quite happy to use whatever kit their ISP supplies "free".

But IMHO the practice offends Net Neutrality principle that end-users have the right to use terminal equipment of their choice. This is enshrined in Ofcom docs, but Ofcom doesn't show much interest in enforcing it.

I get about support problems for small ISPs, and I think it would be reasonable for them to say they will only support their own router. But for them actually to prohibit other equipment from being connected at the user's risk, as some do, is for me going too far.

In reply to a post by Thaumaturge:

But IMHO the practice offends Net Neutrality principle that end-users have the right to use terminal equipment of their choice. This is enshrined in Ofcom docs

Have you got a reference for that?

In the business world, having leased lines that terminate in an NTE which you are not allowed to interfere with or replace is perfectly standard practice - often the router as well. The same applies to the ONT which Openreach supplies for FTTP.

In reply to a post by Thaumaturge:

for them actually to prohibit other equipment from being connected at the user's risk, as some do, is for me going too far

"Prohibit" as in "forbid in the terms and conditions", or as in "make it unreasonably difficult to do so"?

If an ISP chooses not to sell a wires-only product, I don't see why it should be required to.

One reason we have a fairly competitive marketplace and a fairly high degree of altnet investment (at least in some areas) is that regulation is relatively light-touch.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

In the business world, having leased lines that terminate in an NTE which you are not allowed to interfere with or replace is perfectly standard practice - often the router as well. The same applies to the ONT which Openreach supplies for FTTP.

At least in the business world you get to define if you have a NAT or routed connection, even if the provided NTE is a full router product.

In consumer broadband, FTTC/VDSL and onwards, as PSTN shuts down, more and more people are going to be pushed into using the ISPs provided device, at best with a DMZ mode. Those that use one device as ONT and router is more complex of course.

Virgin Media’s “modem mode” software approach should be copied by all these big ISPs (BT, Vodafone, etc). Would be a sensible solution, so obviously won’t happen!!

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In consumer broadband, FTTC/VDSL and onwards, as PSTN shuts down, more and more people are going to be pushed into using the ISPs provided device, at best with a DMZ mode.

95% of people neither know nor care what that means. They just want a service that works, and is cheap. The other 5% have market choices to select a more sophisticated service.

Of course, on this forum, the 95% and 5% are probably reversed

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Virgin Media’s “modem mode” software approach should be copied by all these big ISPs (BT, Vodafone, etc).

BT sell only Openreach, and Openreach already provides you with a modem that you're free to connect your own router to, and handle your own NAT or whatever - so I see no issue there.

The problem only comes with the bundled telephony: if you remove the BT-supplied router, you lose the BT-supplied voice. That's a different question entirely, and again, for the 5% who care, the voice is trivially unbundled.

As for service from Altnets: soon I would expect there is very little of the country that's covered by an Altnet which is not also covered by Openreach FTTP. So the more sophisticated users always have that as a choice, even if it's a bit more expensive.

It seems reasonable to me to have the Altnets concentrate on the "value" end of the market. They need volume to get return on their investment, and they'll only get the volume if they sell cheap and simple.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

In reply to a post by Thaumaturge:

But IMHO the practice offends Net Neutrality principle that end-users have the right to use terminal equipment of their choice. This is enshrined in Ofcom docs

Have you got a reference for that?

See here, Section 3 A bit old now (2017) and references EU stuff which may or may not have been adopted into UK law, I don't know. It's still available from the Ofcom website.

Whether or not it's still technically UK law, the principle remains sound.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

"Prohibit" as in "forbid in the terms and conditions", or as in "make it unreasonably difficult to do so"?

Purely as an example, I'm not singling them out in any way, see the Trooli Ts and Cs Section 5.1 bullet 2.

Edited by Thaumaturge (Thu 03-Mar-22 09:11:13)

I'd have interpreted "use terminal equipment of their choice" as meaning users must be able to connect their own PC/phone/tablet/etc, as opposed to services like France's Minitel.

However I see that Ofcom "identified a practice of concern through our own engagement with ISPs and independent monitoring" and "opened an initial enquiry into the matter". Who knows what that concern was, or whether anything came of it.

Maybe their concern was mobile operators who block tethering? That used to be a big pain, but rarely occurs now.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

The problem only comes with the bundled telephony: if you remove the BT-supplied router, you lose the BT-supplied voice. That's a different question entirely, and again, for the 5% who care, the voice is trivially unbundled.

The same issue with other ISPs using Openreach infrastructure, whom provide voice services in a similar way.

The problem is the obsession with low price/low features. Many families whom are not IT / technical types, have replaced the router as they need features to control internet access for children / teenagers

The only problem is the change over, when PSTN stops and the provider says "now you must use our router to get voice" and the family's experience degrades. Just seems an odd decision by all.

As for service from Altnets: soon I would expect there is very little of the country that's covered by an Altnet which is not also covered by Openreach FTTP. So the more sophisticated users always have that as a choice, even if it's a bit more expensive.

Yes, I'm not worried about Altnets. Although three towns near me are building an Altnet that has no Openreach FTTP status. (Not that OR won't suddenly arrive!).

A lot of Altnets are both the infrastructure provider and the ISP and quite a few of those use combined gateways that contain the Router and the ONT (the bit that provides the termination of the optical connection).

If you look at those that are just infrastructure providers I think they all require you use their ONT (e.g. Openreach, CityFibre, ONFL) but it is up to the ISP what router you use and if you can use your own.

On the ONT side there is a valid reason, whilst there are standards for GPON, XGS-PON interoperability between different OLT (PON headend) and ONT suppliers is still at early stages. Infrastructure providers don't want the significant risk of issues by letting customers plugging their own ONTs in at the current time. Until recently Openreach had the challenge of wrong ONTs being installed and not working, I think they just use Nokia now and have sorted interworking with their other providers.

For the router side unless combined with the ONT then it is normally down to simplicity of support and possibly they are doing something funky to provide IPv4 connectivity.

As things mature we might see more flexibility, but not sure if we will ever get to a "wires only" version of FTTP where you can put whatever you want on the end of the fibre.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

As for service from Altnets: soon I would expect there is very little of the country that's covered by an Altnet which is not also covered by Openreach FTTP. So the more sophisticated users always have that as a choice, even if it's a bit more expensive.

That all depends on your definition of "soon". Here where I live 2 Altnets are building, service likely within a year, but we are not on OR's FTTP build plan anytime in the next 5 years. Plans can change, of course; others have observed that when Altnets start building, by a strange coincidence OR vans appear everywhere in the area, but that isn't happening here. OR can't build everywhere simultaneously, some places will be at the end of the queue, and if my area is one of them then I am not going to see OR FTTP till the late 2020s or maybe even later. By then I'll be over 80, so I might not care any more.

At present the local Altnets operate closed networks, so my "choice", if I don't like or can't afford the single service available over a fibre connection, is to stay with or revert to copper at 30Mb/s tops (I'm 780m from my cabinet).

In reply to a post by Thaumaturge:

That all depends on your definition of "soon". Here where I live 2 Altnets are building, service likely within a year, but we are not on OR's FTTP build plan anytime in the next 5 years.

OR doesn't plan to a 5 year horizon. Every quarter, more towns are added to the rollout; so if yours isn't on the plan today, it doesn't mean it *won't* be built in the next 5 years.

In reply to a post by Thaumaturge:

At present the local Altnets operate closed networks, so my "choice", if I don't like or can't afford the single service available over a fibre connection, is to stay with or revert to copper at 30Mb/s tops (I'm 780m from my cabinet).

Exactly. That's more choice than most people have today.

If you want a more sophisticated service than the Altnet provides, you can still tunnel over it (e.g. AAISP L2TP service for £10 per month - gives you static IPv4 and IPv6)

In reply to a post by AndyPandy:

I sort of get it from a support perspective, but if you have a savvy user, why won't they let you just replace it.

By replace it, I mean replace it, not just put their router into bridge mode, leaving you with 2 devices.

As you will discover when you’re soon connected to Hey!B…their Network Termination Equipment (NTE) modus operandi is a combined GPON router - TP-Link Archer XR500V.

In the UK the default is for the provider to provision kit to use their service - not always but by and large. Consumers now expect it.

Further to this with FTTP / optical networks (and going back to HFC/coax networks) it is presumed in the UK that the network operator will provide the gear for that physical interconnection - the network boundary is not the cable but the port on their device.

Other countries are different for instance USA with their ubiquitous cable networks and some FTTP operators in Europe (operators in Spain, Portugal and Italy come to mind) where the customer can BYO their own ONT/ONU and plug it into the fibre.

But back to the UK, the default is that the operators service boundary includes their kit.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

But back to the UK, the default is that the operators service boundary includes their kit.

Goes back to the early days of ADSL when BT claimed the NTE connection point was the USB connection on the Alcatel modem ("frog" / "stingray"). A lot of experienced people ended up going for the business services to get an Ethernet device.

It was a good move by Openreach to provide an "active NTE" with the VDSL modems, but costs forced the switch to ISP provided all in one devices. Crazy as the network operator was no longer in charge of the firmware at each end of the VDSL link.

With the Virgin Media Hub 3 (DOCSIS 3.0) it took a them a while (> 6months) to sort out the modem mode firmware. Some customers dropped back to slower services on older kit that was DOCSIS 2, to get modem mode !

Edited by jchamier (Sat 05-Mar-22 17:07:56)

Swish do you give you a "Plume" pod, the app does have Swish Fibre branding and they have ownership of the serial numbers so it is Swish's kit.

After a day of using them, they're not for me, they didn't play nice with the P-Hole, VOIP and it's all done over a fairly flaky app - so I removed it and left it somewhere safe.

Swish do supply the PON where the fibre terminates, and you plug Ethernet into that and go, I've since replaced it with a Netgear router, and have way more control over my network now.

My friend has Hey!B in another town, I might pop into his and see what his setup looks like.

A lot of experienced people ended up going for the business services to get an Ethernet device.

It was my first encounter with Draytek kit … can’t recall the model, but it took the USB output of the Alcatel modem, and gave you four ethernet ports. What you did with your 512kbps after that was up to you.

Yes a very clever product to solve a problem that shouldnt have existed. USB isn’t a network interface!

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

A lot of experienced people ended up going for the business services to get an Ethernet device.

It was my first encounter with Draytek kit … can’t recall the model, but it took the USB output of the Alcatel modem, and gave you four ethernet ports. What you did with your 512kbps after that was up to you.

A Vigor 2200USB.

Luckily when it came to setting up some business connections, once the ADSL rollout had reached the area, wires-only was available and a Vigor 2600 did the job. Much better than the Aramiska satellite broadband which had been subsidsed with a regional development agency SMB grant.

I know if you have Virgin Media and put their router in modem mode you can still use their digital phone service.

I currently have the hub 3 in modem mode, then have my own equipment off of that, then have the landline plugged into the voice port on the Hub 3 and works perfectly fine.

Yes Virgin did that a while ago, but they’re not using Openreach infrastructure.

Yes, there's really not a lot to prevent two bridge modes being offered by ISPs like BT - a full bridge mode where the device becomes transparent (of no real use on FTTP as you'd just plug into the ONT), and a partial bridge where the public IP is offered out to the first device to connect on the LAN, the internal firewall is disabled but the ports used for the VoIP service are carved out and not available to use by any devices connected downstream.

I can't see the ISPs doing this off their own backs though, it would have to be something Ofcom mandated.

In reply to a post by jpm:

Yes, there's really not a lot to prevent two bridge modes being offered by ISPs like BT - a full bridge mode where the device becomes transparent (of no real use on FTTP as you'd just plug into the ONT), and a partial bridge where the public IP is offered out to the first device to connect on the LAN, the internal firewall is disabled but the ports used for the VoIP service are carved out and not available to use by any devices connected downstream.

That isn't going to work with PPPoE - at least, not without some horrendous PPPoE spoofing. Consider that the voice port needs to work even if any downstream router isn't connected, so it needs to terminate the PPPoE session itself.

And it's not really going to work with IP/DHCP either, without a lot of DHCP spoofing: the downstream router needs to be assigned the *same* IP address, but the DHCP server must see the same MAC address as the router (or the router needs to spoof the entire DHCP exchange)

candlerb

If the voice port is using a separate VLAN as in the BT implementation would this still cause an issue
for PPPoE?

Sure: if the ISP separates them out using VLANs, then it's fine. They can run two separate PPPoE sessions, or one PPPoE and one IP/DHCP, or whatever they choose.

In that case, you could in principle stick a switch between the ONT and the two routers: send vlan X to the ISP router for voice, and vlan Y to the home router for data.

It’s not really much different to how LTE routers with ‘bridge’ modes operate now, and lots of firewalls can operate in a transparent mode while still manipulating traffic passing through them. I’m fairly sure you could hack something together with this functionality on a MikroTik box if you wanted a POC.

Edit: If you ran the voice port over IPv6, grabbed a second allocation with delegated prefixes for the LAN and then ran your IPv4 as a service over IPv6 you wouldn’t even need to mess around with doing anything hacky - at that point the difference between your CPE in bridge and home router mode would just be NAT for the v4 traffic, Wi-Fi, and firewall rules.

Edited by jpm (Wed 23-Mar-22 00:56:42)