I too have just had Vodafone broadband installed and I'm really unhappy about not being able to use my own router because frankly, theirs is useless. If it turns out to be a dead end then I plan to cancel during the 14-day cooling off period, but in the meantime I'm trying to harvest whatever details I can from the device so figured I'd pitch in
Before tinkering with anything I wanted to confirm the company's official line on the subject. Vodafone has been putting out very conflicting information about its policy and stance on this situation so I rang its broadband support line and asked them outright. As is seemingly everyone else's experience, the rep refused to give out the credentials required to connect, however he did state categorically that they don't mind me using my own router. Verbatim: "If you want to use your own equipment and can get it working on our broadband then fair play to you". He agreed that the policy seemed at odds with itself and was ridiculous. It's like they've sold me a car without the keys but don't mind if I successfully hot-wire it!
The device Vodafone provides is a
Huawei HHG2500; a combined router and VDSL2 modem branded up as a "Vodafone Connect" here in the UK and a "Vodafone Station Revolution" in Italy. It has a completely crippled web interface that only allows the most basic of configuration and exposes very little information about the connection (seriously - you can't even disable its DHCP server, which assumes the entire private network range as its address pool). As can be seen in the photograph on WikiDevi, the device has three RJ11 ports and five RJ45 ports, but Vodafone has placed hard plastic stickers over the light grey ports, marking them as "not in use". Your DSL line goes into the red socket and your PCs go into the yellow sockets. Firmware appears to be based on OpenRG.
One function that
is exposed through the web interface is a configuration export, yielding a surprisingly large (~100 KiB) XML file. Within that file I found two distinct usernames:
autoconfig@broadband.vodafone.co.uk and
dsl000******@broadband.vodafone.co.uk (the latter seemed unique to me so I've starred out the digits). There did not appear to be any corresponding passwords to these usernames, plaintext or otherwise.
I tried swapping out the Vodafone device for an Openreach modem (EchoLife HG612) I had lying around, hooked up a laptop and attempted to make the PPPoE connection. It connected successfully using the generic
autoconfig@broadband.vodafone.co.uk username as above with the password
password (which seemed to be the only accepted combination) Unfortunately I didn't have Internet access at this point, though I had been automatically provisioned an IP address and two DNS servers which resolved all queries to a Vodafone IP address. Trying to browse to any website consequently took me to a Vodafone web page saying something to the effect of "Your router is just connecting now", so it's as if there is some further negotiation the official router performs after bringing up the PPPoE interface.
Appreciating the default settings on the Openreach modem, I
updated it accordingly and removed its VLAN tagging, so all frames are now passed as-is through the Openreach modem's LAN1 interface. Sniffing packets on here showed its usual traffic on VLANs 101 and 301.
Frustratingly this is as far as I've got - close, but no cigar (yet). I don't claim to be an expert on any of this stuff, and this is my first experience of consumer VDSL broadband. Maybe someone here knows what steps the official router is likely to take after establishing the PPPoE link?