Lightspeed ISP WAN VLAN 911 tag

Installing and Using OpenWrt Network and Wireless Configuration
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I'm in the UK and after a decade stuck on ADSL (18Mbps down, 1Mbps up - made usable by OpenWrt's SQM feature), an ISP called LightSpeed finally built FTTP in my area so I jumped at the chance to upgrade (now 500Mbps symmetrical :slight_smile: ).

They provided an eero 7 to connect to the Adtran 631 ONT, and whilst its a nice router and app, I didn't really gel with how limited the settings are - and as I've seen mentioned, it feels like eero is really a subscription service disguised as a router.

I thought I would try and use my old faithful Netgear WNDR3700 v4 to connect to the ONT. In the ISP FAQ it says that I need to use VLAN 911. I've never experienced this before, but after finding a post by @mk24 (hope you don't mind me adding some pictures to your excellent instructions!) it turns out its easy to configure. Hopefully this will be useful for others to setup WAN VLAN 911 tagging (especially if searching for the ISP name Lightspeed):

a) On the Network | Switch page
change the VLAN ID from 2 to 911
on the same line, change the WAN port setting from Untagged to Tagged

wndr3700v4 911 a-switch
wndr3700v4 911 a-switch1214×728 41.7 KB

b) On the Network | Interfaces page
edit the WAN interface and WAN6 interface, to change the Device from eth0.2 to eth0.911

wndr3700v4 911 b-interfaces white.PNG
wndr3700v4 911 b-interfaces white.PNG1203×746 93.4 KB

c) On the Network | Firewall page
I noticed I had to change the flow offload to either hardware or software, for my Netgear to route at 500 Mbps speed.

wndr3700v4 911 c-flow offload
wndr3700v4 911 c-flow offload1184×839 43.6 KB

At some point I'll get new hardware, but for now am very happy with my old WNDR3700v4 as router, and I've put the eero into "bridge mode" connected to a LAN port, to just use it as an AP for now.

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  • hardware offload (as configuration, no matter your SoC-s hardware offload unit is not supported) explicitly breaks wifi roaming, use software offload if you need that
  • you can untag wan vlan on eth0 (and point wan to eth0) to save some 20% of CPU (meaning extra bandwidth)
  • You will get 800-900Mbps total forwarding (less for ip6) with offload, so it can not serve full bidirectional 500/500, would be 1.3/1.1Gbps if second SoC netcard was bolted to switch.
  • SoC spu is so slow that BW significantly drops even having SSH session or the cute web ui you screenshotted open.

Measure https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat before and after each change, and keep record of result.

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