I was a very early Consolidated customer here in Milford, before the implementation of the Fidium name. That means my connection is PPPoE rather then DHCP. I've been thinking about switching to Fidium to get rid of PPPoE (in reality it is not causing any problems) and if I'm reading the web site correctly should save $5 a month.
The downside of Fidium is you get a very locked down router. So before I pull the trigger I wanted to set up my own router. The Consolidated Router I have is a Zyxel VMG4927-B50A. I bought a NetGear RAX10-100NAS AX1800 WiFI router. I only have the 50/50 Mbs PON service so any old router will do.
Getting it to connect was a piece of cake: switched to WAN interface requires login, selected PPPoE and transferred username and password from the Zyxel and I was in. I did not need to clone the WAN MAC address. But the router has the ability to do that if needed.
Some notes about the Netgear router. They really want you to use the cell phone app to set it up. I have no desire to use that and just wanted to connect directly over the LAN. You need to register the device first and I had a problem doing that from the router config and I tried doing it from my my Netgear account, no go. A call to tech support quickly resolved the problem they registered the router to my account. The router's web interface is OK but it has a lot of extraneous white space and figuring out where the data entry fields are can be a challenge but if you have ever configured a router should not be a difficult task.
Now that I know my own router works with PPPoE I'm confident switching to Fidium and DHCP should be a piece of cake. I was actually using the router's DHCP WAN interface to connect to my LAN to make sure the router worked.
/Tom
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