Cisco Meraki MX and 2-3 Access Points on NBN Fixed wireless in Australia

[SCC]

Hi All,

Any feedback about the Cisco Meraki MX and 2-3 Access Points on NBN Fixed wireless in Australia.

Basically is it ok to have Meraki MX and few access points just for home network on NBN Fixed Firewall in Australia

Thanks

[MarcP]

NBN?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network ?

[General-Zod]

I have my Meraki gear, mx, ms and mr hanging off NBN FTTN. Works a treat. I guess it comes down to how reliable the fixed wireless flavour of NBN is and it’s performance just like any other service for that matter. 

Was there anything specifically you were worried about?

[TimHughSmith]

Super old post, but looking at a few things here.

I have my MX64 and everything connected to NBN Fixed Wireless via Aussie Broadband.

Definitely as you've said it's more limitations of the Fixed Wireless likely to affect us.

There is no business grade level of service available to upgrade to, all the same kind of SLA's etc.

So LTE if available would be a good backup option.

Our service can be a little patchy - I think it's just congestion mainly on the NBN Wireless side.

Supposedly the ISP can check and tell you if your area is congested before you go ahead (but I didn't get much info back here) - we also didn't really have any alternative - except Sat (SkyMesh or maybe Elon's new one!)

From what I've seen, the Fixed Wireless is still a lot better than SkyMesh.

Sorry to hijack a little, but curious on your FTTN setup?

Do you have a OneAccess NTD, then a supported NBN box, then your MX?

Or do you have your MX hooked straight up to their NTD?

[Bruce]

@TimHughSmith, I’ll do some hijacking too 😀 The NBN FTTN service is just a VDSL service so there is no NTD as such, just the VDSL modem on the end of the copper pair (the old phone line). The VDSL modem is generally provided by your service provider, but you can swap it if you have a NBN compatible alternative.

For the MX there is two ways you can set it up: if you run your VDSL modem in routed mode (which is normally how they’re supplied) then it will get the public IP address (and authenticate to the provider if they use PPPoE), and as standard the VSDL modem will then provide a private IP address to the MX, so it will all be pretty seamless to setup. On the other-hand you can normally change the VDSL modem to bridge mode which then means it just ‘converts’ the VDSL to Ethernet, your MX will then get the public IP address from your provider directly (and you’ll need to configure your PPPoE username and password on the MX if your service provider requires them).

[TimHughSmith]

Thanks Bruce.

Yeah I think the problem I had in the past was that list of NBN compatible hardware.

Telstra was supplying Netgear routers (with VDSL modem built in) with their own firmware - and you couldn't actually get in and convert it to bridge mode.

This was a while back, but I remember opening the admin page for it, and the bridged option was there, and then it disappears.. so I guess the factory firmware supported it - and they had disabled it for some reason.

With the VDSL device terminating the layer 3, we'd have to NAT everything through to the MX.

I don't love the idea of this with VPN and just double NAT in general.

I'd much rather the MX was terminating the layer 3 connection.

Did you have a good supported device you were using in bridged mode?

[Bruce]

There’s so many out there to choose from. We use Draytek, Netgear and Netcomm devices, all of them have models that can run in bridge mode, just make sure they’re NBN FTTN (VDSL) compatible, and you’ll likely need to update to the latest firmware. The Telstra device you had almost certainty had Telstra specific firmware on it, but it’s worth seeing if there are instructions on the internet on how to flash new firmware to it, I’ve done that to a few Optus devices in my time.