IPTV settings on ER605

[mhoam]

Thanks @Keith_Beddoe 

It appears you have access to that thread? 

The thread identified above is just one of a number of similar threads which are referred in other posts, all of which  have been locked. I understand that they have been created by customers not BT, which is why it is unreasonable to hide them away

[Keith_Beddoe]

No, I do not have access to that thread, but I do remember it from a long time ago, as I referenced it from my own website which I used to run.

It covered mostly Netgear routers.

[mhoam]

Ok, understood and thanks for your contribution

[licquorice]

I can assure you BT are not hiding any information, why would they? There is no reason whatsoever to do so.

[mhoam · Accepted solution]

@licquorice  @Keith_Beddoe 

I appreciate your assistance and apologise for my paranoia re BT.

I have now succeeded in that the YouView BTTV IPTV channels are now working successfully via the TP-Link ER605 Router.

The key info is that the IPTV streams themselves  are not encapsulated in PPoE but delivered via PIM. So the PPoE interface defined on the Router is necessary but not sufficient. I also needed a secondary connection identified with any IP address (preferably an RFC1918 ) to receive the PIM packets (UDP I believe). Once this secondary connection is defined on the WAN connection you may need to add a Route to take the packets across to the LAN side and maybe a Firewall rule to let them through.

Of course IGMP is also required to ensure that those multicast packets don't flood the internal LAN.

The modems in the ADSL/VDSL routers probably combined these two connections but FTTP delivers the packets exactly as despatched from BT Servers hence the need for a Router capable of handling two connections from the ONT.

Hopefully this info may help others who wish to use a third-party Router on BT's network.

cheers

[licquorice]

Thanks for updating the thread with very useful information.

[NeilO]

@mhoam many thanks for sharing your solution. 

Neil

[licquorice]

@mhoam I'm still a little confused by this as I would have thought this would have been brought up on the forum before now (this is the first mention I recall seeing) as there are many customers with third party routers with FTTP and BTTV.

Surely PIM must be carried by PPPoE in some fashion as it is a higher layer protocol. Perhaps there is something unique to the ER 605 that doesn't automatically extract the stream.

[mhoam]

@licquorice 

You may be right, I am not a networking expert. However, I make two observations:-

I searched the BT community forums with different search terms regarding other routers and Youview IPTV channels and found nothing of use. All those found by Google on these forums were already archived as described earlier in this thread, it seems unlikely that these relate to FTTP connections if they were old and out of date.

The information regarding the use of a second interface (not using PPoE) was established by much cleverer people than me who were trying to use BT YouView behind Opnsense (open source) routers on various hardware. They had used detailed logging and tracking apps like WireShark to establish what was going on.  I based my attempts on the OpnSense configurations they found successful.

Perhaps someone from BT could confirm, and perhaps even publish, the networking requirements for accessing their IPTV channels? 
Regards

[licquorice]

Thanks again, for the information. This forum is as good a source of information for BT settings and requirements as anywhere. Hopefully this thread will be of use to others.