zen fibre broadband equipment requirement.

I have been offered zen fibre broadband and am seriously consiidering it. However I am confused. I understand that it requires a BT engineer to come in and change the faace plate and then to fit a BT modem, zen then say "Other than the VDSL modem which will be provided for free, you will need a router which can support the speeds provided by Fibre Broadband and has an Ethernet WAN port with the capability to dial PPPoE. We have tested and recommend the following " they offer a Technicolur TG582 and a Netgear router as choices but say nothing about other equipment which may be available to long standing customers. I have one of their Thomson tg585routers and a Netgear dgn1000 router my query is whether either of these routers would do the job, if they will not then I would hope that one or the other of them would be usable as a wireless extender on another part of my network and see no reason why if this would work why one of them should not be the primary router.

The router needs a WAN port and the ability to set up a PPPOE session. If either of your routers can be configured to do that, you'll be fine. Do you have the full model details of the routers?

Looks like it do-able on the Thomson http://forums.modem-help.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=9310

Edited by deleted (Sun 16-Sep-12 17:51:23)

The Thomson is a tg585 v7 using firmware 8.2.2.5. The netgear is a dgn1000 using firmware version 1.00.34

The DGN1000 is not any good.

Even if it was I would not recommend it, as with FTTC you are pushing a lot more data and the DGN1000 shows signs of under performance even on fast ADSL2+ services

Yes, you can do it with the Thomson but it looks like the Netgear won't work.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

Yes, you can do it with the Thomson but it looks like the Netgear won't work.

Having looked carefully through the settings possible on the Thomson I do not see any way to do it. I preume that I would have to setconnection type as PPPoE and find some way of altering the settings to enable PPPoe in other places, this is just not possible even changing everything possible the connection type is still set as PPPoA in the firmware.
On the other hand the Netgear, and bearing in mind what Andrew has said about the dgn1000 and its capabilities I can see ways of dealing with this but would very likely have a router that was just not up to the job.. So I do have a choice of setting the connection type as PPPoE and in the WAN setup there is a tick box that says Enable PPPoE Relay and in the description of what this does it says "When enabled , this feature will allow a PPPoE client on a local PC to connect to a remote PPPoE server with the gateway acting as a relay agent " which to me is a pointer to the router looking for the connection on the ethernet sockets. But then again I could be completely wrong and would not be surprised if I was.
What I do not want to do is to order an FTTC connection and to find that my equipment will not work and then have to wait several days for delivery of a router that will cope. I would sooner risk buying the recommended equipment and then finding out that what I had would have done the job. However, if I can be sure that my equipment will work I would be much happier not wasting the £50.

Hi, from the link I posted, the first line says

I had this very cool firmware on my Thomson TG585v7 that allowed me to select one of the 4 outgoing LAN ports as an incoming WAN port.

This is basically what you need to do. The Openreach modem needs to be connected to the WAN port on a router that can initiate a PPPOE session. As It stands, the Thomson is an ADSL modem/router and you would need to bypass the modem part.

You may be better off just buying a new router that does this "out of the box" if Zen are unwilling to give you the support you require.

The 585 won't do the job I'm afraid - it's LAN ports are just that, while the 582n has a LAN port that will act as a WAN port; so you can connect it to the BT modem, and run through the 'Fibre' version of the setup.

regards,
Phil.

At its simplest the original poster is looking for a router that generally says it is suitable for a cable service.

I hear the TP-LINK TL-WR1043ND works well.