Vodafone Sure Signal with Vigor 2820

In order to get my Vodafone Sure Signal to work with my Vigor 2820 router I needed to make the following changes on the Router. The Vigor 2820 is running firmware 3.3.4_232201.

The Sure Signal uses DHCP to get an IP address. I made sure I had allocated a fixed address using the LAN->Bind IP to MAC menu. The MAC address is shown on the Sure Signal serial sticker.

From the NAT->Open Ports menu I added an entry to the list of open ports

I named the entry “Vodafone Sure Signal”, entered the fixed IP address of the Sure Signal (192.168.65.2 in my case, yours will undoubtedly be different) and entered the following port numbers.

TCP   Port 50
UDP   Port 500
UDP   Port 4500

Once all the settings were made it took about 15 minutes before the @ light stopped flashing slowly and the bottom green tick light came on.

The lights now look like this :

(all lights are on and not flashing)

And for the first time in 7 years I have a 5 bar 3G mobile signal at home!

Until now I’ve not been able to get any signal at all. Fantastic, I can finally use my phone!

New iPhone 4

My new Vodafone iPhone 4 arrived today. I was previously with O2 but switched to Vodafone so i could use their Sure Signal Femto Cell repeater.

I was worried that switching networks would be a problem. I’m pleased to report it was very straightforward.

I plugged the new iPhone4 into my PC. iTunes recognised the new phone and restored my old 3G settings. After about 30 minutes of copying files it was all working and my old number was working on the new network.

The only thing I had to do was re-enter my Wi-Fi and email passwords.

It was really easy despite changing networks.

The only annoying thing with Vodafone is that they do not seem to support visual voicemail on the iPhone 4. Apart from that moving networks was very easy.