Hello everyone,

Just a quick message here to let people know that Spark, Skinny and Bigpipe now supports DHCP authentication for Fibre Broadband services (i.e. NOT for ADSL/VDSL) as well as PPP.

Which protocol you chose to use it completely up to you.  All Spark provided routers will continue (at this point in time) to use PPP.  VLAN 10 still required for either option.

For those who wish to update their router config to transition across please do be aware that the transition will take 5-10 minutes before the connection will come up after your configuration change, so be patient.

Again a call-out to anyone with an Asus router (and still using PPP), please do yourself a favour and turn off "Enabled VPN + DHCP Connection" as per https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=39&topicid=314911 .  It shows up on our network as your router attempting both PPP and DHCP simultaneously and leads to poor reconnect times if you ever drop offline.  Similarly if you have a Mikrotik router the "Detect Internet" option on your WAN interface results in similar behaviour.  We also see a number of Synology devices trying to do both protocols too.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to chime in here.

Limitations:

If you live in an area where Unison is your Local Fibre Company (now owned by TFF) then DHCP authentication will not work in your area.