Since I got Bell Fibe 1.5 Gbps service installed, I’ve got a few questions about how I set up PPPoE bypass so that I can use my own router. I planned on doing a write up about that after I work out the speed issues that I had with my ASUS hardware, but since enough people asked about this I am doing this today.
First, let me explain why I want to use my own router rather the Bell HH4000 router, which stands for “Whole Home 4000”. I never, ever use the ISP supplied gear as that’s a way for the ISP to lock you in as it makes it difficult to switch providers. Because doing so would require you to basically tear down your network and rebuild it every time you switch. On top of that, ISP’s don’t have the best track record in terms of making their gear secure. Meanwhile most router companies spend more time and effort to make their gear secure. As long as you choose your vendor carefully, using a third party router is better from a security standpoint. Plus if you change ISP’s, at best it’s unplug one cable from the ISP’s hardware and plug the new ISP’s hardware in if you switch. At worst you have to do that and a bit of configuration on both the ISP’s hardware and your hardware. In the case of Bell, it’s the latter.
Now Bell’s HH4000 comes with the ability to do what’s called PPPoE bypass. In short, you type your PPPoE credentials into your router, and it passes them to the HH4000. Then assuming that they are correct, the HH4000 gives the router an external IP address and you’re good to go. It’s clean and simple and mostly works. I’ll explain the mostly part in a moment. But here’s all I had to do. Starting with the cabling:
- Connect A CAT 5e or CAT 6 cable from HH4000 10Gbps Port which is the silver one on the right hand side on the back of the HH4000 to the WAN Port on the router
On the HH4000 side, I had to log into it and do some setup there:
- Go to 192.168.2.1 and be prepared to type in your HH4000 password
- Go to ‘Manage my Wi-Fi’ and do the following:
- Change “Whole Home Wi-Fi” to OFF.
- Under “Primary Wi-Fi network” click on “Advanced settings”.
- Uncheck “Keep a common network name (SSID) and password for both 2.4 and 5 Ghz bands.”
- Turn OFF the 2.4GHz network but leave the 5.0GHz on so that you can get back into the HH4000 if you need to.
- Turn off Guest Network
- Click “Save”
- Click on “Advanced Tools and Settings”
- Turn off UPnP, DLN and SIP ALG
- Click “Save”
Next you have to log into your router and in the WAN section, set it up for PPPoE. How to do that varies by brand. But I will use my ASUS router as an example:
As you can see here, under “WAN Connection Type”, I have PPPoE selected. And under “Account Settings” I have my PPPoE username which starts with “b1” and password. Those have been redacted for security reasons. If you don’t have your “b1” PPPoE username and password, you can either get them from the Bell technician who does your install, or from the MyBell portal. You should also set up your PPPoE connection to connect automatically (in my case that’s the “Disconnect after time of inactivity” option) and make sure that PPP authentication is set to “auto”.
Once you do that, you should be able to connect to Bell’s network. If you get an WAN address that isn’t 192.168.2.xxx, then you’re good to go.
Here’s where I explain the “mostly” part. One thing that I noticed right away is that my upstream speed is way lower than the 1.06 Gbps that my connection is capable of. At the moment I am getting just over half that speed. And that’s likely because of how ASUS implements PPPoE. I say that because if I use DHCP to connect to the router, I get all the speed that I am paying for. Now some of you will say why don’t I use DHCP? That creates what’s called a double NAT which can play havoc with applications. If you really want to get into the weeds, you can read this but here’s what you need to know:
In a typical home network, you are allotted a single public IP address by your ISP, and this address gets issued to your router when you plug it into the ISP-provided gateway device (e.g. a cable or DSL modem). The router’s Wide Area Network (WAN) port gets the public IP address, and PCs and other devices that are connected to LAN ports (or via Wi-Fi) become part of a private network, usually in the 192.168.x.x address range. NAT manages the connectivity between the public Internet and your private network, and either UPnP or manual port forwarding ensures that incoming connections from the Internet (i.e. remote access requests) find their way through NAT to the appropriate private network PC or other device.
By contrast, when NAT is being performed not just on your router but also on another device that’s connected in front of it, you’ve got double NAT. In this case, the public/private network boundary doesn’t exist on your router — it’s on the other device, which means that both the WAN and LAN sides of your router are private networks. The upshot of this is that any UPnP and/or port forwarding you enable on your router is for naught, because incoming remote access requests never make it that far — they arrive at the public IP address on the other device, where they’re promptly discarded.
Thus a double NAT is not optimal. Now to be fair to ASUS, they are likely not the only ones with a poor PPPoE implementation in their routers. I am just pointing the finger at ASUS as that’s the router that I have and I have clearly proven that it is at fault. Which is why I have opened a support ticket with ASUS to get them to address this as in the age of 1 Gbps or faster Internet connections, having a router do what I am describing isn’t acceptable. Thus the vendor of said router should be held accountable.
Now some of you will point out that another option other than to use PPPoE passthrough is to use Bell’s “Advanced DMZ” function along with DHCP. From what I can tell from experimenting with it, it moves your router into the HH4000’s DMZ or demilitarized zone where it can give the the device, in this case my router an external IP address. And this does work as it gives my router the full speed the I am paying for. But based on my research, Bell doesn’t implement this very well as many have reported that a router that sits in the DMZ can often lose Internet connectivity every day or two which is not good to say the least. Thus this option is likely one that you should avoid. Though I may try it for giggles just to find out if the instability of this option that has been noted by others is something that I see.
Now what would be better is if Bell much like Rogers implemented a proper bridge mode. That’s a mode where the device shuts off all routing functions and basically becomes a modem that served up an external IP address to the router. But Bell wants you using their gear for everything and I guess that by not having a proper bridge mode, they force the less technical down that path and lock them into using their service.
If you have any questions about any of this, please let me know in the comments. Or if you have a 100% reliable method to bypass the HH4000, I would love to hear from you as well.
UPDATE: I did some more experimentation with the “Advanced DMZ” functionality built into the HH4000. My conclusion is that it isn’t very stable based on the fact that it broke HomeKit support and VPN connections from my network to another network would not work at all or very well. Thus I would avoid this option entirely.
UPDATE #2: There is an alternate way of doing this that appears to be stable for me and might work for you. Details are available here.
The Move From Rogers To Bell Is Almost Complete…. Here’s What Happened
Posted in Commentary with tags Bell on July 30, 2022 by itnerdReaders of this blog will recall that since the nationwide Rogers outage in early July and one additional outage after that, my wife and I lost all faith in Rogers ability to provide a reliable Internet product. Thus we decided to make the move to Bell. Which to be frank isn’t a company that has the best customer service, but as I’ve said previously, they have an Internet offering that destroys anything that Rogers currently offers. On top of that, they appear to be far more reliable than Rogers at the moment. Thus my wife and I made the switch. And just to get you up to speed, you can read about the ordering process which was a bit of a mess here and here.
Now on Tuesday which was two days before the install, I got a call from Bell claiming that Rogers would not port my number across to Bell. I found that difficult to believe as by law if they get a number porting request, they have to honour it. And when I pointed that out the Bell rep, the rep assured me that she would resubmit the request and get it done. Though the rep also said that I would have to call into Rogers to cancel Internet and TV as Bell couldn’t do that for me. I was fine with that and ended the call.
Total time invested: 2 Minutes.
Ninety minutes later Bell calls again. This time they wanted to explain to me that if I wanted my home phone service to stay working in the event of a blackout, I needed to buy a UPS. I told the agent that I was aware of that as I had read this article on the Bell website. That’s when the Bell rep pivoted to trying to upsell me to TV, mobile phone service, and home monitoring. And the rep was hyper aggressive. I blew the rep off and ended the call.
Total time invested: 6 Minutes.
This illustrates how aggressive Bell are in terms of getting all your services. Thus you have to survive that if you want their services. It also means that you will get more of this upselling the longer you are with Bell.
In any case, we fast forward to Thursday which was install day. My wife and I spent the day before clearing out the area next to the place where the fiber cable enters my condo. Here’s a picture of it:
This outlet is next to the door to my balcony, and this is where Bell ran the fiber cable about 5 or 6 years ago when they put fiber runs into every unit in the building as the were rolling out Fibe Internet. Bell ran individual fibre cables up the side of the building and into each unit. But they didn’t terminate the cable. I am guessing that they just wanted the cables in every unit so that all a tech had to do is light it up if you wanted Bell services. You can also see the Rogers cable jack next to it.
The install window was scheduled for 8AM to noon and everything should take two hours. The tech arrived at 9AM and was done by 10AM. And the first thing that he had to do is to terminate the cable.
The tech ran the cable from the box to this box. Then the tech plugged in a fiber patch cable into this box. I would have liked to see the Bell tech have everything self contained in the box that was in the previous picture.
Now the fiber patch cable went to this:
This is Bell’s new Whole Home 4000. This is the piece of gear that drives your telephone service, provides WiFi and TV. On the back it has a 10Gbps Ethernet port so that you can get fast speeds from Bell’s services. My plan was to use PPPoE passthrough to connect to this via my ASUS ZenWiFi AX XT8 mesh router as I never, ever use my ISP’s gear to power my home network. What PPPoE passthrough means that I use my PPPoE credentials on the ASUS mesh router to connect to the Bell network. Essentially passing through the Bell hardware to connect to the Bell network. I am doing this because unlike Rogers modems, Bell modems do not have a proper bridge mode which sucks for those of us who want to use our own gear. This requires you to get your PPPoE login information from the Bell tech, which he was all too happy to hand over. But if you can’t get it from your installer, you can get it via your MyBell account. If you’re interested in the technical details about how I set this up, I’ll be covering that in a separate article.
Once I did that, this is the speed I was getting from the Bell hardware:
Since I was paying for 1.5 Gbps down and 940 Mbps up, I was getting more than I pay for. However, this wasn’t what I getting from the ASUS XT8:
Now PPPoE does have some overhead, thus I was aware I would lose some speed by using PPPoE passthrough as a lot of consumer routers don’t do a good job of handling high speed PPPoE connections. But only getting just under 400 Mbps was pretty bad. I did some checking inside my router settings and found that I had QoS turned on. That can seriously mess with the speeds that you get. I turned that off and I got this:
This is better, but the upstream isn’t where I want it to be. I did some Internet searches and discovered that this seems to be an issue with ASUS routers where they can’t go much above 500 Mbps when using PPPoE. So I reported this to ASUS and provided my router configuration and logs to them so that they can investigate and tell me what if anything I can do to fix this. Or ASUS just fixes this in the form of a firmware update. But even with these speeds, the upstream speed is about 16 times faster than what I was getting with Rogers. So it is still a win. But I want more. One thing that I will point out are the ping times and the jitter. The ping time is insanely low. It’s one fifth of what I was getting with Rogers. That means that for gaming, Zoom or Teams calls, my wife and I will get great performance. In terms of jitter, which is a measurement of the variation or inconsistency of your ping speed, or put another way how consistent your ping speed is, it’s insanely low as well. Far lower than what I was getting with Rogers. Which again means great performance for gaming, Zoom, or Teams calls.
The only downer on this whole experience was the fact that I can’t use the FibeTV app which if you look at my story about the ordering process was slipped in. Apparently I have to wait until I get a Bell account number to activate that according to the two Bell reps that I spoke to. And that may take until late next week to happen. That really seems dumb and Bell really should do something about that. But I will report back on that when I get that working.
The last thing that I will cover is cancelling Rogers. To my surprise, they didn’t put up much of a fight. And they sent us a Canada Post return label to allow us to return our Rogers hardware. It was all very civilized and a total non-event.
I’ll continue to keep you posted in terms of my progress with Bell including getting my first bill to see if they do anything shady, and getting the FibeTV app working. Stay tuned for that.
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