Hello everyone

I will get my apologies in first if this has already been answered but a search of the forum didn’t turn up anything, hence the new post. I am after some advice about whether what I will set out below is actually possible.

I have recently got Virgin full fibre internet and Virgin have supplied me with a Hub 5x. This is to connect to Virgin’s new PON(?) network meaning there is a fibre connection to the back of the hub not the old coaxial style connection. The 5x hub is very feature light.

It is not possible to put the hub into modem only mode. There is nothing in the hub’s visible UI for modem mode. There is a page (192.168.0.1/?page=modemmode) where you can apparently enable it but all this does at the moment is change the light on the front of the hub green. It changes nothing else and it cannot be used as a modem with direct connection from a computer to the hub. Virgin say modem mode will come eventually but nothing so far. Further there is no bridge mode on the Virgin hub nor can I specify an IP address that isn’t in the 192.168.0.x address range for DHCP or DMZ.

Unfortunately, whilst the hub works OK, the connection is catastrophically unreliable (minimum 6 20+ minute drop outs during the day, every day). These have been identified as wider installation issues associated with the excessively fast roll out of the network in my area. They are not problems with my specific connection.

I still have my vdsl FTTC connection active. What I would like to do is use my 2865 as the central router/ap and have it use the virgin connection as its main internet connection but fall back to the vdsl connection when the Virgin one cuts out.

The Virgin hub does have a DMZ facility. My thought was to enable the DMZ on the Virgin hub and point that at the connected 2865 WAN2 port. On the 2865 I then set WAN2 as the main connection with the vdsl WAN1 as the back up connection for WAN2. I tried this and whilst both routers can “see” each other and the 2865 shows WAN2 connected, at least as far as the Virgin Hub I cannot get any internet connection on WAN2.

My current setting are as follows:

Virgin Hub 5x - DHCP for the 192.168.0.x range enabled, DMZ address set to 192.168.0.2, Hub address is 192.168.0.1, WiFI off
2865 - DCHP enable for LAN on 192.168.1.1, 2865 address 192.168.1.1, WAN2 static IP 192.168.0.2, subnet 255.255.255.0, gateway 192.168.0.1, WiFi on. I have also tried setting WAN2 to obtain its outgoing IP automatically from the Virgin Hub’s DHCP server, but that didn’t work either.

Questions are

1. Is it even possible to do this as a way of getting around the limitations of the Virgin hub 5x and provide some reliability of connection?
2. If it is, I assume I have made a mistake in the either DMZ setup on the Virgin hub or on the WAN2 setup on the 2865. Does anyone have ideas about where I have messed up?

This is a domestic Virgin installation

Very many thanks in advance for any ideas forum users might have

Russ