Vodafone Station TG3442DE internet issues

[leifliddy]

This is more of a commentary not really a bug report. I received a Vodafone Station TG3442DE modem/router in the mail last week which replaced my UnityMedia Connect Box.

**For context, Vodafone recently merged with (or took over?) UnityMedia. So, Vodafone starting sending out their own routers to replace the UnityMedia routers that customers had been using.

I started suffering severe internet connection issues (packet-loss, high-latency, loss of connection) immediately after connecting the Vodafone Station. I thought the issues would get better over time, but they didn't. In fact, it got so bad I was rebooting the Vodafone Station every 5-10 min. So, I contacted Vodafone and asked if I could connect my own modem...and they said I could. Which was a bit surprising since UnityMedia never allowed me to use my own modem. So long story short, I bought a Technicolor TC4400-EU modem, sent Vodafone the S/N and MAC address and they allowed it to connect.

They mentioned something about sending me the telephony access data, which I ignored since this modem doesn't support telephony, and I've never used it and don't need it. **I should probably mention that all of Vodafone's internet plans come packaged w/ a phone plan.

I should also mention that my internet connection is IPv6-based and requires Dual Stack Lite (DS-Lite) to provide IPv4 connectivity to the internet.

So, I connected my openwrt router to the TC4400-EU modem but couldn't get an address via dhcp. The modem had a private IPv4 address assigned to it (that wasn't routeable) and no IPv6 address assigned to it.

Over the course of an hour or so, I sorted out that I could pull in an IPv6 /128 address and a /56 PD subnet on the wan6 interface of my router (via dhcpv6). I then sub-delegated that /56 IPv6 subnet to a /64 subnet on the lan interface. I then enabled RA to advertise the IPv6 subnet + route (to the lan clients)

So now I had IPv6 connectivity but no IPv4 connectivity. So, I just installed the ds-lite package and the ds-wan6_4 interface was created automatically (after rebooting the router). I wasn't expecting it to be so easy. Anyways, that allowed me to connect to the internet with via IPv4 (using private address space).

So, I've been using my own modem and openwrt router for the last day or so and haven't experienced any issues. The internet connection is now working flawlessly. So, there's clearly something wrong with either the Vodafone Station hardware, firmware, and/or configuration.

All I really need to do afterwards was sub-delegate the IPv6 /56 subnet from wan --> lan (this isn't essential, only if you want/need ipv6 connectivity). Configuring openwrt is super easy and only takes a couple of minutes.

@cbruegg I'm not sure what the cause of your high packet loss issue is, and it sucks that the Vodafone modem/router doesn't allow you to view low-level signaling events like ranging requests or timeouts, so it's nearly impossible to diagnose any connection-related issues from event logs on the router itself. And expert mode is a complete joke. You can't view memory info, process info, kernel/system logs, you can't setup static routes or run a vpn service or client....etc. It's just a really dumbed-down device. I'm extremely skeptical of the ram is full explanation. The TG3442 has 1GB of memory which is quite a lot for a consumer router. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a memory leak with Vodafone's firmware/build. I have two ZyXEL NBG6817 routers (running openwrt) with 512MB of memory and I've NEVER run out of ram.

Also, I'm not sure if you have an IPv6-based connection like I do. But, if things continue to get worse, you might consider setting up your own modem + router.

[leifliddy]

[leifliddy]

[leifliddy]

I didn't actually need a WAN interface (ipv4) configured, just the WAN6 interface. Once the ds-lite package is installed, the ds-wan6_4 interface will be created automatically. It just seems 'to work' (without any additional configuration)

root@router:~# ping 1.1.1.1
PING 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: seq=0 ttl=57 time=11.009 ms

I'm not sure whether any information that's derived from DHCPv6 is needed for this ds-wan6_4 interface to work or not. I'll look into that later, but honestly, it doesn't really matter as it's not going to affect the configuration at all.

[leifliddy]

Here are the configs that need to be set on openwrt (could also configure this via the web interface)

first install ds-lite with:

opkg update
opkg install ds-lite

/etc/config/network

config interface 'lan'
    ....
    option ip6assign '64'

config interface 'wan6'
        ....
    option proto 'dhcpv6'
    option reqaddress 'try'
    option reqprefix 'auto'

/etc/config/dhcp

config dhcp 'lan'
    option interface 'lan'
    option ra 'server'

[leifliddy]

It's too bad I didn't see this project when I was still using the Vodafone hardware. I was actually rebooting the router via a fibaro wall plug, a z-wave usb stick, and python-openzwave https://github.com/OpenZWave/python-openzwave

It worked by simply turning off the power on the wall plug, sleeping for a couple minutes, then turning the power back on. **which is a much less elegant solution then yours.