Obtaining provisioning specs for VDSL modems

1

I’m representing the HOA of a large gated community. We would like to provide Wi-Fi at 12 swimming pools to connect networked heaters, pumps, etc., and for guest use. There is a 25-pair Cat-3 cable from the comm room to each building; we would use some of that resource to distribute VDSL to remote gateways. Runs vary from ~200 to ~2100 feet. There are existing VDSL concentrators left over from a previous use of the property.

The Technicolor C2100T looked attractive; new units are available at reasonable prices. However, I could only find online documentation for the consumer-facing side. I wrote Technicolor support; this is an excerpt of the reply: “As far as we know all Technicolor connectivity products in the US are built and customized according to the ISP’s requirements. None of these products should officially be available through retail. Correspondingly in the US all official Technicolor xDSL/cablemodem support is organized through the ISP’s supplying the Technicolor products. To our understanding the C2100T modem is a product that is made specifically for CenturyLink and any provisioning information for this unit should be available only to them. You can of course try getting the required information through CenturyLink support but, most likely, it means that this modem will not be suitable for your project. We are sorry for any inconvenience.”

Any suggestions for obtaining provisioning info for this device? If not, can you recommend a modem / dual-band AP combo that is reasonably inexpensive for which full documentation is readily available? Ideally, we’d like one with ‘bridged’ mode, so users could roam between APs without IP address changes. Also, it should use 5 or 12 VDC, less than 25 W, so we can power them with PoE splitters (AC power is not readily available at the remote sites). If the price were low enough, we’d buy ~50 units to cover the entire property.

Thanks,

Stewart

2

Factory default the CPE. Hold in the reset button while powering on the CPE. Keep the reset button held in for about 30 seconds. That will erase any exiting config on the CPE.

Then you should be able to go in and configure the CPE to your liking.

3

Thanks for the reply.

Does that mean that the default configuration (after using the setup available in the consumer-facing GUI) will automatically negotiate with the DSLAM, using the highest speed common standard and profile with suitable noise margins, and will be able to communicate with the network on the Ethernet side of the DSLAM, without any ACS at all? If so, that would be awesome.

This unit can do bonded WAN. If connected to two DSLAM ports, will it negotiate that automatically, too?

4

Yes. It all depends on how you configure the CPE and DSLAM. Are you using an Occam B6 by chance? Those have a known issue where if there is a bond group, both pairs have to come up before the DSLAM will start passing traffic. After both pairs come up, either pair can drop and traffic will still continue to flow. But as soon as both pairs drop, both have to come back up for traffic to flow.