killernat's geek out blog

I have recently upgraded my internet from VDSL (50/10) to gigabit (500/500) unfortunately this means that I have to use bell as an ISP and that means I needed to use their crappy home hub router/gateway. Initaly just set it up so my existing router would use the bell router as a bridge to talk to bells PPPoE network because I had no way to use the SFP ONT that is registered with their network until recently. my old TP-link consumer grade gigabit router was on its last legs (constantly crashing for no reason). I have been wanting to upgrade my network with a more professional setup and ended up getting a Mikrotik hAP AC router (https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B01BMMK4HI)since I wanted to keep the cost down while still having 802.11b/g/n/ac to cover my apartment (if i were in a house I would have gone for a 24 port router with distributed AP’s) and an SFP port and poe injection. Any way the MikroTik routerOS opens a lot of configuration possibilities (and head aches) that normal consumer routers dont offer like bypassing ISP hardware

Please note: this will not work if you have the TV bundle I have read something about bell using VLAN 37 for this but I do not have a tv subscription so I cant test it

After a week of tinkering and playing with my new toy I was able to get the router to work on bells GPON using the provided ONT (since it is white listed on their network)

1. you need to get your LAN configured how you need it dhcp server, wifi, firewall rules, etc.
2. remove the SFP module and Fiber from your Home hub (open the door on the router where the fiber enters)
3. install the ONT and Fiber into your SFP when you open the sfp you should see the interface panel in RouterOS you should see the vendor info
4. configure a VLAN with ID 35 and set its interface to use the SFP port
5. setup a PPPoe interface using the B1 username and password from bell you can get this from the bell one bill system (including setting the password)
6. tell the pppoe to use the VLAN you made earlier as its interface
7. If all went well you should be online

bonus: I found that the default MTU is 1480. If I simply increased the MTU to 1520 (to bring the pppoe up to 1500) on the VLAN and SFP the SFP would start fragmenting packets and throwing Rx too long errors I guess it just doesn’t like jumbo packets all that much. I did find that if I brought the MTU to 1512 it would work fine (without errors) and the PPPoe was running at 1492.