Do I *need* the Telus router?

Cucumference wrote: ↑ No, you do not need to use their router. Your "modem" in this case is the fibre drop. You can hook that modem directly to your own router. It does not do anything special. You just plug directly into the ONT (that is the box that converts the fibre optic signal to ethernet) or use the bridged port 1 on the Telus router.


Keep in mine most consumer routers have a problem routing 1Gbps of traffic. Make sure the router you use is actually better before changing it. Otherwise there is no point.

Kaitlyn wrote: ↑ How come when I take the router out of the equation, and just plug the the cable that was the router's LAN port into my switch, no go?

Scote64 wrote: ↑ Presumably you mean the cable that was in the the Telus router's WAN port, not LAN port.

If you are plugging the ethernet cable from the ONT directly into a switch, then you have no router in the loop, and any device attached to the switch will be trying to get a WAN IP address directly from Telus. Presumably you are only authorized to have one WAN IP address by default, so only the first device would succeed. And even if the others got IP addresses, they wouldn't be on the same LAN and couldn't talk to each other. Point is, you need a router to provide a LAN if you are going to use more than one device, either yours or the Telus router.

You haven't said what "no go" means in the context of plugging your router into the ONT cable. Is your router set to get a WAN IP address by DHCP? If so, is it getting a WAN IP address from Telus?

Kaitlyn wrote: ↑ Gotcha - okay so that's why I need the router behind the modem - something to represent my public IP beyond my internal network.

Annoyingly the telus router doesn't fit in the smart box - is there another type of router/device designed to be performant and basic? I'd even rather NOT have any wifi (antennas!) functionality on it. Then I'll plug my own wifi router into the one on my main floor, which serves my towhome on all floors well.

I guess I mainly want that router behind the modem to 1) Fit in the box closed and 2) Be able to NOT be the bottleneck for any network traffic - on 300mbps up/down and gigabit internal network, and plan (hope!) to maximize that internal network speed for photo+video transfers between devices.

Cucumference wrote: ↑ You might need two.

Any router that you put in this box will be very isolated for the townhouse. And it appears that you don't want it hanging outside the box. Which means wifi is going to be iffy.

A lot of routers will fit in the box, but I'm not sure what you actually want in this case.

Kaitlyn wrote: ↑ Yeah it's fine to need two I guess. And for this one in the garage to not have wifi.

So are non-wifi (apart from turning wifi off) routers even still a thing? I guess the one I put in the garage will actually be handling the most internal network bandwidth, so want it to be fully capable of handling all the network traffic, not just some cheapo router that happens to fit

I've just heard some routers start to fail with too much traffic or too many connections - not sure if that's on wifi or what though

And then for the second router I can look into separately, it'll be handling the phones basically.