pFSense with Verizon FiOS

I moved across country and I have a new ISP with new and interesting problems. I was told by them that I need to keep their crappy “high performance dual band WiFi router” on my network. Anyway before I clone the Mac address and burn their router on an alter to the gods of decent networking. I was wondering if anyone else has done this, and any issues they may have run into.

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To the best of my knowledge, you don’t need to use any ISP’s router, however, for some ISP’s, you may need to use their modem (ex. Bell Canada).

Some ISP’s sell their modem + router as a single unit, and disabling the routing portion may be difficult/impossible, depending on the firmware installed.

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They don’t really have a modem, FiOS is FTTP so I have a fiber box in my entry way closet, that’s the “Modem” the router is just an interface to get onto their fiber network. But from what I’ve read they use the MAC address to authenticate you’re using their hardware, for TV services and the like (things I don’t have YAY!). Everyone I talked to thus far has been pretty emphatic that I need their equipment on the network and internet visible, so that’s why I was just going to clone the MAC.

Un-related rant: They wired the each room in the apartment with Ethernet runs, but they only wired one up (in the master bedroom) I want to fucking kill who ever decided that was the optimal placement for the ONLY connected Ethernet drop in the apartment. Kill is too strong, maybe just place a Ethernet cable across their main hallway in their home.

I messed with a FiOS setup years ago and I remember that it required some vlan config in order to bridge the WAN connection to a 3rd party router. This may have been specific to having TV/Internet/Phone coming in the same line.

If you run into any trouble cloning the MAC address, see if you can get the router to bridge the connection instead…