Zen CityFibre / EdgeRouter

Posted <2022-08-18 Thu 18:53> by Aaron S. Jackson.

Back in August last year, I posted about how I needed to upgrade my Cisco 2950 network switch with something which was gigabit capable since CityFibre would be available soon. Well, finally that day has come and my migration from Zen VDSL to Zen CityFibre was completed this morning.

I had a few concerns about this. Firstly, I wanted to make sure I could keep my /29 subnet from Zen. They were a bit unsure with the answer ("I'll have to ask my manager", etc), and readdressing things and updating DNS glue records would have been a huge pain. Second, I was a bit unsure of the performance of my EdgeRouter Lite, since unfortunately CityFibre requires PPPoE to the optical network termination (ONT).

Fortunately, the migration went very smoothly, and so did the configuration of my EdgeRouter. I'll dump the relevant part of the config below for anyone preparing to do the same. The PPPoE has to run over VLAN 911. The ONT supports mini jump frames so there's no need to configure MSS clamping to accommodate the PPPoE headers.

ethernet eth2 {
    duplex auto
    mtu 1508
    speed auto
    vif 911 {
        mtu 1508
        pppoe 0 {
            mtu 1500
            password ******************
            user-id **********@zen
            firewall {
                in {
                    name wan_in
                }
                local {
                    name wan_local
                }
                out {
                    name wan_out
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Overall, I'm a satisfied Zen customer, just as I have been for nearly 7 years now. Speedtests are reporting 920Mbps symmetric pretty much all the time. I've not seen it under 850Mbps :)

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Comments and feedback are welcome by email (aaron@nospam-aaronsplace.co.uk).

Tags: computing