{"id":1306,"date":"2013-08-23T22:07:48","date_gmt":"2013-08-24T03:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.danjoannis.com\/?p=1306"},"modified":"2015-07-04T13:53:03","modified_gmt":"2015-07-04T18:53:03","slug":"making-bell-fibreop-work-with-a-pfsense-router","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.danjoannis.com\/?p=1306","title":{"rendered":"Making Bell FibreOP Work With a pfSense Router"},"content":{"rendered":"

Atlantic Canada is very fortunate to have access to Bell Aliant FibreOP Internet. It is a legitimate Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) service, in the same price range as cable and DSL offerings. Speeds start at 50\/30 (download\/upload in Mbps) for $70\/month without any promotions.<\/p>\n

\"FibreOP<\/a><\/p>\n

As great as the Internet itself is, the wireless router they include is the bottleneck. It is an Actiontec R1000H. Our biggest headaches with it were low WiFi throughput and frequent WiFi drop, but the interface was a little lacking in advanced features.<\/p>\n

\"Actiontec\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The logical solution is to use another router. Unfortunately, Bell has configured the service in a way that simply swapping in a new router will not work at all!<\/p>\n

Through some research and my own trial and error, I was able to install pfSense to a spare computer, and take control of my Internet.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer:<\/strong>\u00a0Do not follow these steps if you have Bell’s IPTV service, as it will no longer work<\/span>. There are other sites that describe how to keep those services working, but mine does not. As well, though there should be no impact,\u00a0I advise against doing this if you have FiberOP Home Phone and rely on it for emergency communications<\/span>.<\/p>\n

This is not an easy task. It requires a very good understanding of computer networking, basic understanding of Linux networking terminology, and availability of network equipment (switches, wireless access points, cables, NICs). Chances are you found this page because you meet some of that description. Just know that if it isn’t working out, you can plug in the Actiontec and pretend it never happened.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

First – LMGTFY<\/h1>\n

Step 1 is to always look online. It is very likely someone else has posted their experiences. Sure enough, I found some<\/a>\u00a0forum threads<\/a> that helped point me in the right direction. In the end, the one that was the most help was post #73 in\u00a0this one<\/a>. However, if you don’t have a spare computer, here is a cheap but very effective alternative<\/a>.<\/p>\n

They key to getting it to work was to know that Bell sends all WAN traffic out of the fibre modem on a different VLAN. Specifically, VLAN 35. Knowing this, it becomes clear that no off-the-shelf consumer router is going to do the job out of the box.<\/p>\n

You need a router that supports VLAN tagging, and the ability to treat a VLAN as the WAN connection.<\/p>\n

I am a big fan of DD-WRT, and tried to accomplish the above using my DIR-615 with DD-WRT. Unfortunately, I could not get it to work with the options available in the web UI.<\/p>\n

\"Upstairs<\/a><\/p>\n

Instead of spending too much effort to get it to work on embedded hardware, I went the easy route: setup a pfSense Linux Router.<\/p>\n

Creating a pfSense Router<\/h1>\n

pfSense is a distribution based on FreeBSD that allows you to easily create and manage a very powerful router, firewall, and other services device.\u00a0It has an excellent UI with many, many features, and will let you dig into advanced features if you want to.<\/p>\n

Here are the hardware requirements:<\/p>\n