Configuring a modem that Eircom haven’t supplied to work with your EFibre connection isn’t actually that difficult but if you look at the Eircom website or you talk to their support team you will only find the settings for the ADSL connection.
The reason that I needed to configure a new modem for an Eircom EFibre connection is the Eircom FT2000 router that the supplied to one of our customers has a defect. The bridging mode does not work. It should disable the NAT, DHCP, wireless, firewall and VOIP features of the modem. When you enable bridge mode by going to Internet>VDSL>Edit and change the connection type to Bridging, some of the options on the page such as NAT become disabled however when you save your settings you will still be natted, DHCP is still enabled and so too are all the other features that should be disabled once bridging is enabled. In my opinion this was disabled or broken intentionally. My investigation shows that in the past few months a lot of users of bridging functionality have encountered serious bugs such as a rebooting loop and bridging being disabled after power is disconnected from the device. My personal experience is that ISP’s don’t want you to use bridging so it wouldn’t surprise me if this was a very low priority bug to fix. The problem is, I have spent at least six hours working on the bridging problem and a further eight hours working on trying to source, collect, install and configure a replacement router. All while a busy office has no Internet connection.
So if you have one of these Eircom FT2000 routers and you need something that works and that allows bridging, I highly recommend the Netgear D6400. It has a lot of great features, support for A, B, G, N and AC wireless standards, 4 1GB Ethernet ports, two USB ports and a very straight forward user interface.
To connect your third party router to Eircom, you will need to apply the following settings.
| Encapsulation | PPPoE |
| Multiplexing | LLC |
| VPI | 8 |
| VCI | 35 |
| User name | eircom@eircom.net |
| Password | broadband1 |
| VLAN tagging | Enabled |
| VLAN ID | 10 |
Make absolutely certain that you configure the VLAN part. If you overlook this you will not establish a connection. Eircom support currently don’t mention anything about this.