VDSL SFP Bridge Modem

Turris Omnia
35

I took a risk spending €100 on a SFP VDSL modem with no guarantees that it would work. I am pleased to report that it works well in my environment:

Router: Turris Omnia
Firmware version: OpenWrt omnia 15.05 r47055

SFP module: VX-160CE VDSL2 SFP Modem (Remote Telco Grade)
(Purchased from Meconet, Germany)

ISP: NowTV (part of Sky), United Kingdom. VDSL FTTC

Approximate process (a lot of trial and error went on!):

  1. Put the SFP port in your Turris – it should work out of the box. Check it is recognised:

    i2cdump -y 5 0x50
    No size specified (using byte-data access)
    0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f 0123456789abcdef
    00: 03 04 22 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 01 0d 00 00 00 ??"…?..??..
    10: 00 00 ff 00 50 72 6f 73 63 65 6e 64 20 20 20 20 …Proscend
    20: 20 20 20 20 00 00 00 00 31 38 30 2d 54 20 20 20 …180-T
    30: 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 56 33 2e 34 00 00 00 da V3.4…?
    40: 08 00 00 00 31 38 32 33 34 48 35 4d 39 31 37 41 ?..18234H5M917A
    50: 30 33 36 38 31 37 30 39 32 36 30 30 00 00 00 20 036817092600…
    60: 30 30 33 30 35 30 30 43 35 30 42 42 20 20 20 20 0030500C50BB
    70: 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 45 44 4c 31 36 43 56 31 EDL16CV1

  2. Get your ISP settings correct. For me, this was the limiting factor.

For others reading this struggling with Sky FTTC broadband, it is possible; don’t give up! There are many resources on forums across the net but not all in one place. The key settings that I had to look carefully at were:

/etc/config/network:

option broadcast ‘1’ # VLAN tagging
# SFP port is linked to eth1 (sfpswitch.py may be required if link isn’t correctly configured)
option ifname ‘eth1.101’ # use VLAN 101
option clientid ‘<DHCP client identifier string>’ # use Wireshark (filter udp.port == 67)to obtain, then hex encode without padding (=)
option vendorid ‘<obtain from wireshark>’

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