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I recently purchased a dedicated Internet connection from an ISP and was shocked when I was told I had to have a Cisco 800 series router or higher in my home network to properly configure the network before gaining access to the internet. I don't believe I need this router. I would be shocked to know that there is something special about this router that prevents me from configuring any other router for my network to gain access to the internet.

What I know:

  1. The connection between my network (WAN config) and the ISP is based of a static IP configuration. I have the WAN IP address, the subnet mask, the gateway address, and 2 DNS server addresses from the ISP.

  2. The ISP also issued a Public Static IP Address, which is visible to the entire internet.

  3. When the WAN is configured using the static WAN IP address settings in my plain old TP-Link router, I can ping the ISP gateway server and the DNS servers, so I must have been connected to the ISP network. But I can connect to the internet.

The Problem

  1. I CAN'T connect to the internet (i.e. can't ping google, yahoo, etc).

  2. I don't really know what to do with the Public Static IP Address from the ISP (i.e. how do I configure it in my router, etc.)

Questions

  1. What do I seem to be missing here? What needs to be configured for me to gain access to the internet?

  2. Are my assumptions correct? Can I just plug-in and configure any home user router and gain access to the internet?

  3. What functionality of Cisco routers could the ISP be expecting of any router connected to their network?

I am pulling my hair out about this and will be highly appreciative of any response that can shed some light on this. Thanks in advance for your responses.

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1 Answer 1

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WAN links require a couple of things to be configured on your router before it will work correctly

  • Encapsulation, this will be one of three, either HDLC, PPP or Frame-relay, this has to be set on your router to what your ISP have on theirs.

  • Clock rate, when you have a WAN it will normally use use serial cable, one end of the cable is called DTE and the other is called DCE, a clock rate has to be configured on both sides, your ISP will have one already set and you just need to configure it on your side.

In all these settings should be available from your ISP.

Your public static IP address is probably to use with NAT.

Hope this helps.

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