As a counterbalance to all the forum reports of Roon requiring technical skills beyond a layman’s first world globalized daily routine, I want to quickly share my effortless ISP switchover experience from VDSL to cable service.
That’s going from an O2 home box with added personal Asus wireless router to a FRITZ!Box 6660 cable router.
After hooking up and turning on the FRITZ!Box, and while keeping the old Asus wireless router running, the only thing I had to do was to change WiFi SSID and password in all of our household’s 16 wireless devices.
And voilà, everything just works as in the last four and a half years with Roon.
For further system details, click my avatar …
I moved from Vigin Media in the UK (docsis 3 cable service) 1Gbps to BT FTTP 500Mbps service.
When on VM I used a VM Hub4 but I used it in modem mode and used my own router - an ASUS RT-AX88U.
On the day of my BT installation an engineer came and installed the ONT on the wall and a new BT Home Hub.
At this point I had two Internet connections working but all devices were still connected to the VM service.
Then I unplugged the BT HomeHub from the ONT and connected the WAN side of my Asus router to the ONT instead. Then by simply changing the router Internet connection mode from ‘native’ to PPPoE and entering the BT login and password details - easily found on the Web - my router connected to the BT service and all my devices got their Internet connection back. All 22 devices on my household were disconnected from the internet for no more than five minutes and no further migration was required.
There is an easier way. When I was with Virgin Media, I used my own router. About 2 years ago, I upgraded that router from an ASUS RT-AC66U to a RT-AX88U.
instead of updating the WiFi SSID on all of the WiFi connected devices (about 12-15 in this household - 4 people with phones, tablets and portable game consoles, laptops etc), I just changed the WiFi SSID and password on the new router to match those of the old router. When that was done, all of my WiFi devices reconnected with no further effort.
I also changed the Lan side IP address of my new router to the same as that of the old router. I don’t believe that this was necessary. I didn’t have any devices on static IPs but I did it ‘just in case’.
Then, all that I had to do was set up the ip address reservations and port forwarding rules from my old router (which would have to be done whenever you change routers) and everything was functioning as it was previous to the router upgrade.
This post, and my previous one, have been a bit longer than I intended but, basically, with just a little bit of advance planning, the execution of such changes can be kept hassle free and the disruption caused can be kept to an absolute minimum.
I hear you, originally planned on doing that too, but I stayed with the defaults as printed on the new router to make things easier for my technophobic wife in an attempt to make all those things as transparent as possible.
That is, of course, a perfectly valid reason if, for a long time, you have been drilling into others: “If you need to connect a new WiFi device, look at the label on the router”.
I did not have that issue: Neither of my two ASUS routers have had the WiFi settings printed on them in a location that was accessable once the router was installed
I, long ago, changed the SSID(s) used in my house to use a more recognisable SSID (there were originally lots of people using VM hubs in my area - before I got the ASUS routers) and a machine generated, very long, password. The sad thing is that I can actually remember the 28 digit pseudo random alpha-numeric password that I employ - but no one else in my house can
Instead of using the router label, I have to make a note of the SSID and password elsewhere - where all who know can find it.
Many modern routers have removable, reversable card inserts for the Wifi Connection details so you can write alternate connection details on the reverse and insert the card with the new connection details visible rather than those supplied by the manufacturer - but you still have to be aware that if you ever do a full router reset, the WiFi SSID and password will also be reset to the manufacturer supplied settings.
