I was never a fan of Huawei or any other entry level devices sent out by the ISP’s for residential use. Even though they work fine for the majority of time I found them unreliable and often needing a restart. When I stumbled across a Cisco 800 router I decided it was time to upgrade my home network to something a bit more reliable.

OpeanReach-TalkTalkFibre

Openreach Modem: Huawei HG612
TalkTalk Router: Huawei HG533

A lot of information is available on the Internet about installing Cisco 800 routers to work in a home environment with fibre services offered by BT, but I couldn’t find anything useful regarding TalkTalk. After a lot of fiddling around, and annoying my flatmates, I finally got this to work so thought it was worth sharing.

Unlike BT Infinity, TalkTalk fibre does not use PPPoE and therefore does not require authentication or the configuration of any ATM/Dialer interfaces. You still need to encapsulate the correct VLAN but this is basically a LAN connection. The configuration below covers configuring the Ethernet interface and sub-interface, encapsulating the correct VLAN, PAT configuration and the default route. Feel free to post a comment if you have any questions.

controller VDSL 0

interface Ethernet0
no ip address
no fair-queue
no shut

interface Ethernet0.101
encapsulation dot1Q 101
ip address dhcp
ip nat outside
ip virtual-reassembly in

ip nat inside source list 1 interface Ethernet0.101 overload

ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 dhcp

In addition to the above I also acquired an Aerohive AP to use for wireless services. See the links below for getting an Aerohive or Meraki AP as both of these units are very capable and offer some great enterprise level features.

Aerohive AP: http://www.aerohive.com/resources/webinars
Meraki AP: https://meraki.cisco.com/lp/free-demo

Cisco800-AerohiveAP