Hacker News Reader

Comment by nness | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed it gets quite murky when dealing with fibre-to-the-premises, particularly in the UK. Although I don't think an ISP would disallow BYOD, I imagine they'd just not be as likely to support it.

I recently moved ISP, partly because of cost, but also because they offered a great home router as part of their bundle. The installer could not utilise any of the existing wiring in my house, had to be all drilled a second time...

Conversely, my last ISP used some awful Nokia modem that barely supported any kind of routing or customisation and I picked them specifically because it was a rental and the fibre wiring had already been done.

It's fairly common for ISP's in Australia to also give you a choice of BYOD or buying one of theirs. Usually you pay outright for the modem, however, so its yours to keep. That said, this is changing with the national fibre roll-out. But with ADSL being the de-facto choice, BYOD makes sense.

View on HN

> I've noticed it gets quite murky when dealing with fibre-to-the-premises, particularly in the UK. Although I don't think an ISP would disallow BYOD, I imagine they'd just not be as likely to support it.

In France, I've noticed that some ISPs (Free for FTTH and SFR for FTTC + cable attached to the router) they'll offer the possibility of configuring the provided router in "bridge" mode, where you basically get the external IP to whichever equipment is hooked up to their router.

I've also had FTTH with SFR, which have a separate device which terminates the optical connection (ONT) and speaks ethernet with the main router. I don't remember if the main router was able to work in bridge mode. It was possible to connect your own router to the ONT but you had to jump through hoops [0] to actually receive a working DHCP response.

Bouygues also had the separate device for terminating the optical connection, connected via ethernet to the main router. The only catch was that it talked over vlan 100 for some reason, but other than that it was smooth sailing.

I've never had Orange, but I hear it's a pain to replace the actual router with them.

---

[0] IIRC you had to send some custom DHCP options pretending more or less to be an actual SFR router.

BYOD is really easy here with DSL. With fibre they try to push the legal limits by arguing that their device is required because its part of their network. But because the law explicitly says the network has to end at a passive point, they got fined. If they don't provide the login and vlan id's, you can just report them to the authorities and they will handle it.

I've got FTTP in the UK (from Andrew's and Arnold). There's a provided bridge which takes the fibre connection and relays PPPoE to my own router. I believe that's a common way to do it.

With Aussie NBN most providers use pppoe or dhcp, which allows byod or ISP router.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com