Credit to Conor: https://conor.engineer/2018/02/10/replace-the-eir-f2000-router/
I’ve done the same at home and want to memorialise this in case the websites go down 🙂
I recently got Eir’s Fibre To The House (FTTH), I get speeds of 300Mbps down and 50Mbps up which is a big improvement over the 2Mbps down and 0.5Mbps up I previously had. It is a great service and I am very happy with it!
BUT the Eir F2000 (Just a rebranded Huawei HG659b) which is supplied with the installation is a terrible piece of equipment! It constantly drops connection and has to be restarted due to unknown software issues a lot. I eventually gave up on it completely after 2 or 3 months (and a replacement unit) and sought to replace it with anything else.
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I have my own networking setup in the house and I was just using the F2000 as a bridge to connect to the Eir network (You can see a post about my full home networking setup here: https://conor.engineer/2018/02/17/home-network/).
My router is a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X which is an excellent gigabit router for about €50 (Note it’s just a router no Wifi/Modem/etc). I love Ubiquiti gear, it’s very reliable and well supported (all the networking gear except for switches in my house is from Ubiquiti). Their stuff is a bit more difficult to setup than standard consumer equipment but it is far better equipment overall.
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This router is able to directly connect to the ONT (Optical Network Terminal) box that is supplied when FTTH is installed through the eth0 (WAN) port.
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The F2000 can be replaced with any router that supports VLAN tags and getting its IP over DHCP but I will show you how to do it using the EdgeRouter X. Eir say that in order to connect to their network your equipment requires VDSL2+ but from my research this appears to be untrue however I have only done this with the ER-X and this is the only router that I can guarantee this works with.
To recap if you get a router you need to be able to:
- Set the router’s WAN port to connect using DHCP.
- Set the WAN port’s VLAN tag to 10.
Here are the instructions for the ER-X
In the ER-X admin panel click “Add Interface” then “Add VLAN”.
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Then enter the following settings:
- VLAN ID: 10 (This is very important if this value is not 10 it will not work)
- Interface: eth0 (This is the routers WAN port)
- Description: Eir FTTH (Any name is fine)
- MTU: 1500 (1500 is recommended for the Eir Network)
- Address: Use DHCP (Eir will assign your public IP address using DHCP)
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Then save the interface (If you had any other WAN interfaces e.g. PPPOE click “Actions” beside it and then “Disable”).
Connect the ER-X to the ONT and that should be it, the ER-X may need to be restarted.
When I did this first the ER-X mistakenly recognised the ONT as a 100Mbps device instead of a 1Gbps device which limited my speed to 100Mbps but after a few restarts it recognised the ONT correctly and it has recognised it correctly ever since.
Since I removed the F2000 I have not had any downtime due to the Eir Network.
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask,
Conor.
NOTE: I am more than happy to answer questions on this topic, however my responses may be slow, I get lots of emails about this topic every week. If you have a question about this topic please comment here instead of emailing me so that I can help as many people as possible at once. I have received a lot of requests asking if I could install a similar system for them in their home, I unfortunately do not have time to fulfill these requests.
Thanks to Finbarr Brady for the original post that inspired this one: h̶t̶t̶p̶s̶:̶//f̶i̶n̶b̶a̶r̶r̶.d̶e̶v̶/2̶0̶1̶7̶-̶0̶7̶-̶1̶3̶-̶r̶e̶p̶l̶a̶c̶e̶-̶e̶i̶r̶-̶f̶2̶0̶0̶0̶/ (This link is now broken and has not been put back online but is available on the Internet Archive here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220910084907/https://finbarr.dev/2017-07-13-replace-eir-f2000/)
He has a guide about how to replace the F2000 with an OpenWRT router, without his guide I wouldn’t have known the correct VLAN ID.