iiNet FTTH smart wiring routing issue, how to solved
We are having a great amount of trouble getting our fibre to the home properly setup and was wondering if anyone could recommend any next steps. Here’s the story so far. Cisco 1941 is used most time on the network.
We reside in a new estate where all the homes have been ‘smart wired’. All the wiring sits in a locked box at the front of our house and is apparently property of Vic Urban (now known as places victoria I believe). Initially while they were testing the connections in our estate it had a modem in it, and routed internet to all the Ethernet ports in our house. Everything worked swimmingly, until we were told we needed to sign up with either iprimus or iinet.
After choosing iinet a technician from Vic Urban unlocked the box at the front of our house and replaced the modem with what I believe is some sort for fibre switch. It sends the internet through to all the Ethernet ports but only one can use the internet at any one time, as it does not assign IP addresses. We have plugged in our BoB Lite and have wireless, but 3 our of our 4 ethernet ports in our house do not have internet and cannot be plugged into our network as it can stop internet going through to the BoB.
We want to be able to use these Ethernet ports as we have media players as well as other home PCs. We have talked to both Vic Urban and iinet and have been advised that we are unable to have a router in the locked box at the front of the house due to something about the telecommunications act, and that they don’t have authority to put in ‘personalised equipment’.
Has anyone encountered anything like this, or know of any possible solutions?
The solution:
1 You need to configure those ethernet ports to be plugged into the BoB modem.
You will need to get a cable contractor in to reconfigure / rewire your ethernet distribution system so that the line from that box terminates where you want to place BoB and all three outlets each run back to that same location as separate runs.
You will then be able to install BoB and it will allocate a unique IP for each outlet/device. Otherwise you can only have one computer plugged in anywhere.
The other option is to only connect BoB to one of the outlets and use the wireless on Bob to connect to all the devices – not as good but probably a lot cheaper for you.
2 The firm that built the house haven't done the job correctly. There should be an area adjacent to that box with a "patch panel" so that the services from the box all terminate externally (phone, television, internet connections etc) and also all the leads from the various outlets in the house terminate – a panel that the end user can alter at will. You could then terminate your router on the incoming line and terminate each router port on a line to one of the rooms.
That of course would cost extra money to install and possibly the Vic Urban service was hoping to get an additional fee for a "multiport termination" built into the box (their supplied and rented router much the same as Foxtel charge $20 per additional room for PayTV).... Also as you could only install a wireless router at the patch panel location (often in a garage) the actual wireless coverage could be pretty bad from that location.
I'm sure there is an angle there somewhere – there always is with these smart wired houses (generally you are even locked to Telstra!) Personally I'd avoid them like the plague