Hi all
This is a bit convoluted and a bit techie but please bear with me. My question boils down to: Can a BT vision box find the BT Home hub it needs if there is another router on the same LAN and that other router is not part of the btinternet network?
For various reasons, I've been trying to build a home network that has a backup if one of our broadband connections fails. As such, we have two phone lines and a different broadband connection down each - therefore two routers: one btinternet, one zen.
A mate gave me a free BT vision box yesterday and said all I needed to do was plug it in and, providing I have bt total broadband (which I do), all would be well - not so. When I plugged it all in, it didn't work (error code C03 fwiw which is some sort of connection problem from googling) but my first suspicion was that it had picked up the zen router not the bt home hub - which was exactly what had happened. Having quickly separated the two, I got it
connected directly to the bt home hub and indeed it picked up its IP address from there - but still wouldn't go any further (error C03 again). It turns out that I need to subscribe to BT Vision (so my mate was wrong!) which I don't mind at £4 per month but without (presumably? disabling dhcp server on the zen router) I can't force the bt vision+ box to "find" the bt home hub as it doesn't seem
to have a manual IP configuration. Unless, that is, the bt vision+ box is clever enough to find the bt home hub in another way. The fact that my first test last night saw it pickup an ip address from my zen router makes me think the vision box expects only one router on the network and
that router has to be the bt home hub.
Anybody know anything on this one?
In principle, I don't mind disbaling dhcp on the zen router - I think I know how to get most devices to have static ip addresses and gateways (ps3, ipad, laptops) but not sure about things like kindles. The minor issue might be that zen is Fibre so disabling dhcp on the zen router would mean the only dhcp server would be on the bt homehub - which is a slower connection (and I'm not paying for
two fibre connections - you can take single point of failure too far!!).
Sorry I've waffled a bit - couldn't really see how to explain any more quickly.
Cheers
Rob
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