If you have searched for a thread with this title, it is likely that you are wanting to find the best way to connect your Deco M5 when switching to London Community Fibre. We started off by connecting the existing Deco set up to the supplied router in Access Point mode. The downside was that we now had two wireless networks. Both worked well, but who needs to switch from one to the other depending on where you are in the house?

I have just successfully connected my system in Router Mode using MAC cloning. The main Deco is connected directly to the little box the green fibre plug goes into (this is the modem) using the DHCP setting in the app. The router supplied is not connected at all. However, you do need to note the MAC number on the base of the router supplied as this appears to be how the Community Fibre Network knows you are legit. You enter this into the MAC cloning box on the app when you are in router mode - you can't see it in access mode. You don't need a login and password. It seems that is coded into the modem box the fibre is plugged into.

The connection speed of my wired in desktop (Ethernet through a Belkin switch, which is in turn connected to the main Deco) is very close to that advertised by Community Fibre. Don't expect this to be anything like reproduced through the wi-fi network, particularly if your furthest Deco is connected at the end of a wi-fi daisy chain like ours, but the speeds throughout are quite adequate for most needs and better than connecting through the CF supplied router in access mode.

It can be a bit fiddly getting the thing to work. At first, I may have been too impatient and not waited long enough for the red light on the main Deco to go out and switch to green. The technique seems to be to put the Deco into router mode while connected to it with your phone. I had to stop my phone switching to my EE digital connection to stay connected to the Deco once it was disconnected from the router. 

So, you need to have the main Deco disconnected from the internet, and powered on, in router mode DHCP, with the cloned MAC address in place. Then power off the little box the fibre cable goes into (the fibre modem) and disconnect the supplied router from the fibre modem. Connect the supplied Ethernet cable between the fibre modem and an Ethernet port on your main Deco. Then power on the fibre modem and cross your fingers (well I did!). The red light came on and stayed on for what seemed an age and then suddenly switched to green. And to my delight I realised that I had an internet connection. I then plugged our wired network into the other main Deco Ethernet port (we have a separate VoIP phone connection and a desktop).

Some devices needed to be rebooted to work properly (a Google mini for example), others didn't. The wireless printer needed to be reconnected using the WPS facility on the app because it had been connected to the supplied router, and two computers that were linked couldn't find each other and had to be reconnected because they were treating it as a new 'public' network as opposed to 'private' (Windows) even though no changes had been made to the wireless network or the SSID. We also had to reset the VPN on the portable devices to make sure they saw the new setup as a 'trusted network'.

At the time of writing, this has been running for 18 hours without any problems. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the scheduled reboot for 3am tomorrow passes off without incident. If you don't hear anything, it was fine.