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Virgin Media Warns UK Broadband Users Not to Switch Routers Off at Night - ISPreview UK
(www.ispreview.co.uk)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Yep, after moving from Germany to the UK I was pretty surprised that in the UK you’re not supposed to get this kind of information from your ISP.
In Germany you can get your own DSL/cable/fibre modem and your ISP has to give you the necessary information to get these devices into their network.
Wait, do you mean, it's illegal to ask for it?
In my case, it just depends upon the ISP's policy.
In fact, with the current ISP, even though they provide their on modem (copper line), it has a pure bridge mode available, which I can connect to my other router and have fun looking at those packets with full transparency and the tech even went ahead and explained to me what I messed up, before resetting the modem for me, when I did use the bridge mode.
Not illegal, but the ISPs are seemingly under no obligation to give you those details. In Germany, there’s the “freedom of routers” embedded in the telco law. So they HAVE to give you everything you need to get your custom router online via their wire/fibre.
Bridge mode is just using the ISPs router and bridge that into your router. It’s not the same - you still need the ISP’s access device instead of just yours.
OIC, so, same as here. Germany seems to be having pretty well made laws in these cases.
Except that it is a layer 2 bridge and I couldn't connect to the network directly, either way, because their line is copper ^[] and consumer routers/modems are usually RJ45/RJ11.
See, in Germany you can buy your own cable modem or fibre endpoint and connect that to the copper wire/fibre line.
I feel like we can do the same in other places too.
It just doesn't make much sense for me to buy one of those, considering I don't expect to be using a copper endpoint anywhere else I go.
I probably will get my own Fiber modem when viable (as in, I get a provider that doesn't force their own modem on me).
The major Fibre player here, requires use of their modem, of which, even the WiFi password can only be changed using their Android app. Said app connects to the internet and most probably tells their systems the new password to change to (which would of course, be in plain text), which then remotely changes the WiFi password.
Most probably, other major ones do the same.
There are some smaller players (probably Tier2/3 ISPs), which would let us have our own modems after enough effort, so I'd probably go with one of those.