Recently, we moved our household. Yes, we did. We built a house and we just moved in recently. At the time of writing, it looks like a bomb went off. Cardboard boxes and bags everywhere, furniture not yet at the perfect place, office room not yet ready. But the new cat tree arrived and was installed quickly. Our felines already love it!
Get the internet working!
On the day of moving into the new house, one of my primary tasks was to set up the internet connection and make sure the basic networking and also the TV is working fine. It looked all good when I connected the router. It seemed to have a signal. But when I tried to browse the internet, only a Swisscom landing page was showing up, notifying me that the internet connection has to be activated. What? So that was phone call number one.
I called Swisscom, explained to them what the problem is and if they could help me. They just told me, well, it is not a Swisscom router you have there. And they were right. I’m paying for 10 Gigabit fiber internet. But until the time of moving, Swisscom did not have a router that was capable of bringing that 10 Gig speed also into the home network. So I had to buy another router. It was the Zyxel XGS-PON Fiber-Router AX7501. It is certified by Swisscom, which means that you can use this device for Swisscom fiber internet as well as for Swisscom TV.
Need to pay for support? Not with me!
The guy on the hotline really tried to help, and I appreciate it. But when we reached the root of the cause of “no internet but a Swisscom landing page”, he mentioned that he should connect me with the next level tech support, but that would cost some money. Wait, what? That would be the first time ever since I’m a Swisscom customer, that tech support will cost me money! Well, thanks to the internet, I was able to find a solution. And it was easier than expected.
The solution
Depending on the specific network expansion situation, the Swisscom network supports the following fiber-optic technologies:
- 10 Gbit/s technology XGS-PON to ITU standard G.9807.1
- 1 Gbit/s technology point-to-point to IEEE standard 802.3-2008, clause 58, 59
Swisscom explicitly mentions that only routers and modules certified by Swisscom can be connected to the new 10 Gbit/s technology (XGS-PON). And the Zyxel AX7501 is one of the supported routers, probably the only one available currently. But that doesn’t mean that it is just plug-and-play. You can connect everything and the router also gets a signal, but there is no internet except the Swisscom landing page.
So what should I do?
There are two settings that have to be set in the WAN connection settings of the router. Probably settings that the original Swisscom router already has set.
First, you have to set the DHCP option 60 to the value “100008,0001”. Next, you have to set the VLAN ID to VLAN ID 10. That’s it. Save the configuration, and that should already do the trick. Try to browse a website now, it should show up.
A bit of googling saves you the money for paid support, since the information is obviously publicly available. But you first have to realize that such settings are necessary.
Source of information: Connecting external routers to the network – Help | Swisscom