Sky hub and mesh network problems......

[reilskein]

There is quite a lot about this on the internet and so it appears that sky may be a bit behind the times. Mesh networks are bcoming more and more popular, I tried one and it improved the internet in my home greatly. The problem is Sky is a bit of a block to perfect mesh because of it's archaic practice regarding its modem/router setup.
Put simply, it does not allow the hub to be set up in bridge mode so that the hub acts as the modem and the mesh system acts as the router. Yes, you can put the mesh into bridge mode and turn off the hub's wifi, but in doing so you lose most of the useful features of the mesh system. The deal situation is to use the mesh as the router and the hub as a modem. It follows that Sky could simply fix my problem by allowing bridge mode, they can give excuses but there is no really good reason they shouldn't.
A second solution would be to allow a third party moden and router setup, but again Sky are not really helpful here as it is not straight forward to just connect your own equipment. Sky did not origianlly allow this anyway but i have read that since earlier this year they do. However Sky are really unhelpful in giving the information you need to do it, I phoned them up and they didn't have a clue, Kept giving me the password to get onto the settings web interface, which i explained i knew but wasn't what i meant by how do i get the information to connect my own modem and router. They eventually said it couldn't be done, despite it saying on the forums it could.
Any way here i am, sorry for the rant, i'm not too happy with Sky. Like i said, ideally Sky would just let me use their hub and put it into bridge mode. Failing this does anyone know how i can use a different modem with my mesh system as the router?
I also have my old BT openreach modem which i got from sky before they made the hub work without one. Can i just plug this in and then add any router i want? I have tried it and all of the lights go green but i cannot get the mesh router to work, I read to put it in PPPoE mode but it asks for username and password, which the Sky person on the phone did not understand. If the openreach modem connects to the Sky network then i assume it is doing the correct handshake and i should be able to use any router, does anyone have any comments or advice?
Thank you for sticking with me if you have got this far.

Thanks
roadrunner email

[seawright]

First thing is what broadband do you have?
Your profile says "Sky Broadband Everyday Lite" which is ADSL whereas your remark that you have a BT modem provided by Sky would indicate Sky Fibre which is VDSL.

If ADSL then you do require your Sky hubs ID and password which would have been registered with Sky the first time you connected but whether Sky agents know where to find it is a different matter. It doesn't really matter as it can be calculated or extracted from your Sky Hub.

If VDSL then any ID and password will do as long as it is in the correct format (eg. randomuser@skydsl|password).

This string is sent encoded as a HEX string as option 61 in the router's DHCP request. Without it Sky's DHCP servers will not offer a WAN IP address. Your mesh's gateway router will need firmware that allows option 61 to be configured. Depending on the make and model of router that you are using this may be available in its web interface or telnet/ssh access may be required. If the default firmware doesn't allow this there may be updated firmware available from the manufacturer or suitable third party firmware such as DD-WRT or OpenWrt. A web interface would normally allow the ID/password combination to be entered as plain text whereas telnet/ssh will probably require it to be converted to a hex string which may even have to be split into two separate hex strings before entry.