VDSL and Netgear Prosafe FVS318G

Summary

I decided not to use the ISP (BT) "Home hub" for various reasons including lack of security (BT can control it), lack of configurability, inadequate ports etc. etc. so picked Netgear Soho "Prosafe FVS318G to link my network to the ISP via the VDSL modem and my 35Mbit/second line. For the first six months of use it was not a happy experience with crashes, disconnects and rather strange behaviour of the FVS318G. Eventually Netgear released a version (3.1.1-14) of the firmware which fixed most of the issues. I have not "updated" since on the grounds that it works well enough fort me. If you wish to read the experience, carry on.

The router hangs...

(all this with firmware version 3.0.6-16): After the trauma of installation (see below), the problems continue... On the 24 December 2010 there was no Internet connection. In fact there was NO connection to the router which had stopped issuing dhcp addresses when I booted my laptop and the one computer left on overnight could not log in to 192.168.1.254 (the fixed address of the router). The Ethernet lights were on and flashing and the WAN lights were both on. I did not find out about telnetting to port 1998 before I rebooted it so I could not check to see if it was still listening to Telnet. It certainly did not respond on port 80 for http. It looks like another "Microsoft-like" solution coming on i.e. put it on a timer switch to turn it off for a few minutes during the night. Sigh.

Update 5Jan 2011: In fact the router has not hung since that event. BUT there has not been much traffic either since we were on holidays in England most of the time. I limited the number of connections of any one "user" (don't know what that means exactly) to 20% so that might have had an impact. BUT certainly one user can make the router unuseable for anyone else. I set up a big download with multiple connections on a 35Mbits/second connection and other computers could not even resolve IP addresses, nor log into the router. When the download finished all went back to normal without a reboot.

Update 8 Jan 2011: Hung again last night ,again this morning and this afternoon in the middle of my Team Fortress 2 online game. Symptoms are that lots of the activity lights flash (maybe just electronic busy indicators) but does not respond to pings, dhcp requests, login requests or any form of user activity on any of the ports. Turning off and on the power recovers it. There are about 5 computers connected to it doing nothing more than web browsing, some downloading and email; no vpn. Pro it maybe but safe it is not.

I should have looked more carefully in the Netgear forums using the term "hang" but there are numerous people having a problem with this device. If you have one and can therefore log into the Netgear support, there are at least two threads October 2010 and January 2011 The post for January 11th contains a positive note from member Ivit which indicates that firmware version 3.0.7-13 (beta only) has solved the problem for him. Since the moderator decided not to permit my post about the bug being on-going since October I will repeat it here Netgear are being slow about fixing this software fault.

Update Dec 2014: It has now been working more or less successfully for 2 years. I say more or less since it is rebooted now and again when the internet slows down. Whether this is the router that is at fault or BT I cannot say.

Request to Netgear support submitted

I decided to take the plunge and ask Netgear for assistance (Sunday 9th January) pointing out the solution that seems to have fixed the problem for Ivit. I await the resulting "have you plugged in the power" type questions with some trepidation.

(update 10 Jan 2011) Netgear responded without any hassle of "have you plugged it in correctly" telling me that they are investigating this known problem and to revert to "version 15", which I guess means 3.0.6-15, and they will alert me when a new version fixing the problem is available. This does not fully solve the problem but the router will automatically reboot when it latches up. That would be better for me since I have to leave for several weeks in a day or two leaving it in the hands of techno-illiterates.

Update 13th January: Unfortunately, that also failed in exactly the same way last night after working for 2 days. It did not recover itself (I left it for 5 hours). I power cycled the device and it recovered this morning. It hung again this afternoon and I did the power cycle again. The only characteristic that I can identify is that it is related to uploading to the Internet. In the 2 days it was up I did some very large downloads (Suse Linux) with no trouble. This morning wife was on Skype hence quite a bit of upload traffic. It failed at a moment of very low traffic so it is not a load sensitive problem.

But first you must connect the router...

21 Dec 2010 I tried to connect my Netgear ProSafe FVS318G to the VDSL modem installed by the BT engineer on 20 Dec 2010 in place of the BT home hub. My goal was to use the VPN facilites offered by the FVS318G to connect back to home from France. I tried for 2 days to get the router to connect with the ISP without success but I eventually found a configuration that persuades the VDSL modem to make a connection. I am still not sure what I did to avoid the problem of no connection. See below for the explanation.

From various forums, I read that I had to set the "login" to bthomehub@btbroadband.com, the password left blank and the connection type to PPPoE; no success. I then changed it's IP address to the same as the BT Home hub (192.168.1.254) but did not change it's MAC address; still no connection. There were no errors reported, it just did not connect. I do not know the MAC address of the BT home hub WAN port so I could not fix it to be the same at that. The following image is the broadband setup page.

I started with the "login" as bthomehub@btbroadband.com and ensured that the PPPoE box was checked. Subsequently I added the "account name" and "Domain name" that you see - no connection. I then hit "auto detect" and it told me "PPPoE found - please enter the configuration information" (but what else I was supposed to add I am not sure).

The status page continually said "not connected". I made sure that I had the latest firmware 3.0.6-16 (by downloading and overwriting it). http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/16425

contains the details of the firmware I am using.

I then changed a few things...

1. Entered "password" in the originally blank password field
2. Changed the DHCP range to the same as the BT home hub (192.168.1.64 to 237)
3. Put in "home" in the "domain name" field above.
4. Deleted "account name" above

... and it connected! Here is the same page with the working configuration:

My only theory about the above is that if you tell the FVS318G that login is required but don't provide a password, it doesn't even try to login.

Here is the status page when the router is connected to BT Infinity VDSL modem. I am puzzled by the zeros in the MAC address at the bottom of the page. The help claims it to be the "MAC Address of this WAN port"

Tedious problem when using Firefox

Despite Netgear claiming to have fixed it, there is a very tedious problem when using Firefox (in my case firefox 4.0 beta 7 at the moment). The first page displays but any page that you try to click to displays only the number "304" at the top left of the page. If I keep hitting "reload" it will eventually display the page. Chrome does not do that, neither does Opera. I do not feel like investigating.

Should I have bought this?

I am regretting this purchase right now (Jan 8 2011), not only because of this tedious start but because of the current complaints about the router dropping out starting in August 2010 and still ongoing in December2010 that I found on the Netgear forums when investigating this problem. Also, completely blocking traffic is really, really tedious. On the other hand, if I could get it to work it is full of useful functionality and not too expensive; if it worked it would be great.

Update December 2014: in the event the router eventually worked. I am now considering replacing it as a result of a potential upgrade to my BT infinity service. This router now seems to be the bottleneck in Internet speeds for me (20Mbitsps). I need one approximately double that. On the other hand do I want to repeat all the troubles above?