Blawgg

Setting up any existing broadband provider’s modems with another vendor’s wireless router is a nerve wracking task, but the advantages of a wifi far outweigh the troubles. After having setup an MTNL trband with my Netgear WGT624 v3 and run it for almost an year, I now bought a Reliance wimax 600kbps plan, to escape the wireline irregularities of an MTNL landline.

Setting up the netgear router again was a challenge, but in the end turned out to be simpler than with the MTNL modem.

Both MTNL and Reliance require you to login – MTNL with your CA # and phone #, and Reliance with a Subscriber ID and password. Now, I don’t know what the technical term for it is – but both logins are actually different – the MTNL log in is a network level login (that doesn’t use cookies) while the Reliance thing is on the application level and probably does use cookies since you keep the browser window open. So with MTNL, when configuring a separate wifi router, you need to reconfig your MTNL modem as a bridge connection instead of PPPOe (go to admin console 192.168.1.1->Home->Wan i think).

With Reliance however, you don’t make any changes to the Wimax modem (is it even a modem.. hmm). So with the netgear console it’s much simpler. All i had to do was

1) Reset the netgear router first using the rear hidden button

2) Skip the setup wizard – go to Basic Settings (you could run the wiz too and let it detect the DHCP internet connection)

3)  Mark ‘Does your internet connection require a login’ as NO

4) Account name/Domain name doesn’t matter

5) Internet IP Address – mark ‘Get Dynamically from ISP’

6) Domain Name Server address -  mark ‘Use these DNS servers’ and put in the Reliance wimax DNS servers (you can find them in your copy of the CAF)

7 – Router MAC address – mark ‘Use default address’

8 – The Wireless settings link is up to you

9 – Click LAN IP Setup  on the left menu bar. Change the IP Address to 192.168.1.2 instead of 192.168.1.1.

10 – Tick ‘Use  Router as DHCP’ and put the Starting IP Address as 192.168.1.33 (it’s basically to avoid conflicts with other IPs.. why 33? i don’t know.. picked it up from somewhere and it seems high enough to be safe)

That’s pretty much it. Remember to save your settings by revisiting the links to check if they still persist. Also remember that Reliance Wimax needs to be turned on about 5-10 mins before you can actually use it. To do a clean start, save settings on the netgear, switch everything off, turn Reliance on, and after 5 mins turn Netgear on. After another few mins, go to your browser and login to the Reliance site etc etc as you would normally do.

Hope this works for you!