The area I live in will now finally have Airtel fiber. Some questions I need help with: • Can we use our own high end router with Airtel fiber rather than the ones they provide? If yes, can you help me and suggest a great router that can cover every area of a 2bhk flat if needed easily if placed on a room on one end and not centre of the flat? Budget: Upto 15K since it's going to be literally used 24x7x365 • Should I just keep the router ready and when the Airtel folks arrive I should tell them to use my router? • Any other gotchas or notes I should note when it comes to these things?

I have Airtel Fiber at home, the way fiber cabling works, I don’t think it would be possible to use own router, and in fact, the routers Airtel uses (Nokia and Huawei), they can remotely manage it for diagnostics and support (which is good and bad). At best, you can hide SSID on it, connect LAN cable and hook that up to your own router, but it may affect latency/speeds depending on port/cable type. Having said that, their own routers are dual-band and are fairly reliable for serious work too.

The router that airtel gave me is very poor. I lose range on the 5ghz band just a few meters away in the same room. I hooked up my more powerful router to the airtel router using a lan cable and configured it in repeater mode. After that the range has been quite good

So looks like I will have to wait to see once the connection is live and if needed use a new router or extender to increase the range! Sucks we can't use our own routers :( • also do you guys have 2 different connections at your house? I read almost everyone at RI has that setup? • Which Airtel plan you guys use?

I have 40 mbps unlimited plan on Airtel (Rs. 499/month) and it acts as backup, and 200 mbps unlimited plan on YOU Broadband (Rs. 1180/month) which is primary connection.

+1 on their routers being good. Range for the 5ghz connection was ok. If you're taking the 799 plan(100mbps) then you will pretty much never need 5ghz. I used one for almost 4 years without a hitch and eventually closed it when I shifted. Their customer service is also amazing, they come to fix it within 24 hours-ish.

perfect! Thank you all ❤️

@strong-evening-37474 I use a TP Link Deco Mesh router (M4) with both - an Airtel connection and Tata Sky broadband (separate places). Both use Nokia routers and you cannot use your router as a dialer — which you may have been used to (like a PPoE dialer). I have turned off Wifi on the Nokia router/modem they have supplied and use the TP Link Wifi router as an extender. You lose some functionality this ways - but it is not so bad. I am still able to run a DHCP server on my TPLink router and set custom DNS on it.

got it! Very helpful, thank you @loud-glass-33663 ❤️

@strong-evening-37474 IMO, you shouldn't try to use your own router directly in any case, although there are products such as Ubiquiti UDM that allow a fiber to be connected directly. I always use the provider's router for the phy connection and authentication and disable any wlan, dns, dhcp, security features. Then connect it using ethernet to my own ubiquiti router that handles all the firewall, dns, dhcp, vlans, etc. This simplifies service calls if something goes wrong. They can ensure that the connection to their router works w/o messing up your internal network.

@helpful-gigabyte-47939 gotcha! Makes sense!! Thank you 😄

@strong-evening-37474 is this the mesh router from Airtel?

@many-minister-78351 haven't yet got the connection! But as far as I know it's not a mesh router that they use, it would be a double antenna usual dual band router from Nokia or Huawei

Oh ok thanks