Billion 8900AX-1600 R2 & Sky Broadband/NowTV Broadband

This page is as much for my own recollection as it is for informational purposes. The details listed below are not specific to the Billion router, though the guide focuses on it. I do not have any instructions for other models of Billion routers, or any other manufacturer.

It also only applies to the VDSL service.

Aim

By default, both Sky Broadband and NowTV Broadband (with NowTV being a brand of Sky) offer their own routers for use with the service. These are generally just plug-and-play, and provide little configuration information which can be gleaned, and then transferred to your own equipment. They also do not offer any support for third party routers.

This guide contains the information needed to setup the Billion 8900AX-1600 R2, including getting IPv6 working which has, from my own research, been somewhat of a problem for users of third party equipment.

Prerequisites

You will need the MAC address of the WAN interface of your Sky/NowTV provided router.

Instructions

Sky uses MAC Encapsulated Routing (MER), which is somewhat unusual compared to other Openreach-based providers who tend to use PPPoA. In the Billion, this means that the connection type will be IPoA.

The service also requires a username and password to be provided as part of an Option 61 setting, which although mostly made up, is still necessary. This should look something like the examples below:

The format requires the name of the user followed by the @sky or @nowtv string. A pipe character should separate that from the password which should be eight characters in length. I have seen other variations, such as people using longer passwords. In any case, eight characters worked fine on my connection.

The VPI/VCI settings should be set to 0 and 101.

As specified earlier, the MAC address of your service provider router should also be entered in the MAC Address Spoofing section of the Billion. I'm not one hundred percent sure this is required, but haven't had the ability to test what happens if the MAC address isn't spoofed.