Ok, as some of you may be aware I have been trying to rig up an ADSL Modem (a Draytek Vigor 120) to a new Router that has the DD-WRT firmware on it, a Linksys E1000.
Ive got Sky ADSL Broadband and after much digging and faffing around to get a non-Sky Modem/Router to connect to the sky internet connection I discovered, you cant.
Well, actually you can but your connection speed is massively reduced. It seems Sky use MER (Mac Encapsulated Routing) on many of their networks. It seems that my local exchange is an MER one. As far as I can tell (from googling quite a lot) is when you dial into Sky, its on a PPPoA protocol, after that it will change to an MER protocol IF your router is accepted by its MAC address. This is where the problem lies, my non Sky Modem would connect to Sky and I could use the internet but it remains at a lower speed as the modem could not authenticate with MER and hence I cannnot get the better speed. Its a big difference too, the modem was getting 4mb, the sky router was getting 11mb. Massive difference. Sky have been very sneeky and clever to stop people using their own routers instead of the issued one.
In doing my digging about I did find some very weird things which I think are how Sky intended in order to stop this sort of thing. My WAN (not LAN) MAC address changed each time I connected and reconnected the router to the phone line. It would also sync to a different server with a different IP address. In other words it seems impossible (in my area anyway) to connect to Sky with a different router as I dont know what the MAC will change to when I manually input it in the ADSL modem.
Anyway, I have wasted my dosh on the modem but that will end up on the bay now as I have solved my issue by accident.
Someone mentioned on another thread of mine about 'bridging' or putting the sky router into 'modem only mode' I couldnt find this option anywhere but I tried something and it worked just how I intended. God knows how, but it worked.
I connected the Sky router as normal to the ADSL line, connected ethernet socket one on the sky router to the DSL (incoming) socket on the linksys router and then from ethernet socket one on the linksys to the pc.
And it worked! I can access the internet as normal, and the DD-WRT data traffic is working so I can see the amount I am downloading!
Fantastic! Im sure many of you will read this and say wow hes managed to link two routers together, like thats never been done before! But I never knew you could connect an ADSL router to a DSL router then to a PC.
My knowledge of networking, ip addresses, ADSL, DSL, PPPoA, DHCP could be lost in a thimble.
Anyway, I hope this is of some use to someone, feel free to post your mocking comments about how dimm I am and how connecting two routers together is not the holy grail I thought it was!
Ive got Sky ADSL Broadband and after much digging and faffing around to get a non-Sky Modem/Router to connect to the sky internet connection I discovered, you cant.
Well, actually you can but your connection speed is massively reduced. It seems Sky use MER (Mac Encapsulated Routing) on many of their networks. It seems that my local exchange is an MER one. As far as I can tell (from googling quite a lot) is when you dial into Sky, its on a PPPoA protocol, after that it will change to an MER protocol IF your router is accepted by its MAC address. This is where the problem lies, my non Sky Modem would connect to Sky and I could use the internet but it remains at a lower speed as the modem could not authenticate with MER and hence I cannnot get the better speed. Its a big difference too, the modem was getting 4mb, the sky router was getting 11mb. Massive difference. Sky have been very sneeky and clever to stop people using their own routers instead of the issued one.
In doing my digging about I did find some very weird things which I think are how Sky intended in order to stop this sort of thing. My WAN (not LAN) MAC address changed each time I connected and reconnected the router to the phone line. It would also sync to a different server with a different IP address. In other words it seems impossible (in my area anyway) to connect to Sky with a different router as I dont know what the MAC will change to when I manually input it in the ADSL modem.
Anyway, I have wasted my dosh on the modem but that will end up on the bay now as I have solved my issue by accident.
Someone mentioned on another thread of mine about 'bridging' or putting the sky router into 'modem only mode' I couldnt find this option anywhere but I tried something and it worked just how I intended. God knows how, but it worked.
I connected the Sky router as normal to the ADSL line, connected ethernet socket one on the sky router to the DSL (incoming) socket on the linksys router and then from ethernet socket one on the linksys to the pc.
And it worked! I can access the internet as normal, and the DD-WRT data traffic is working so I can see the amount I am downloading!
Fantastic! Im sure many of you will read this and say wow hes managed to link two routers together, like thats never been done before! But I never knew you could connect an ADSL router to a DSL router then to a PC.
My knowledge of networking, ip addresses, ADSL, DSL, PPPoA, DHCP could be lost in a thimble.
Anyway, I hope this is of some use to someone, feel free to post your mocking comments about how dimm I am and how connecting two routers together is not the holy grail I thought it was!
