Yes, you can directly connect your fiber internet to your UniFi gateway.

I recently upgraded my home internet connection from Teksavvy cable (via Rogers) to a 1.5 Gbps Teksavvy Fiber connection (via Bell). I’m loving it, but the combo modem / router / AP they sent me was… an interesting choice on their part.

The Adtran 854 v6 is your only choice if you’re using Teksavvy fiber. They ship it to you when you order their fiber service. No, it is not a Playstation 5. Yes, it really really wants to live somewhere out in your living room like a giant plastic objet d’art. “How dare you even think about trying to rack-mount me somewhere?”, it screams from its mostly hollow body.

Like every modem I’ve ever been sent by my ISP, I just want it to, you know, be a modem and not anything else. So - bridge mode is usually step 2 for me. Teksavvy, being awesome like they are, has instructions on how to bridge this device on their site.

But don’t get too excited, because there’s a big caveat. Even though I’m paying for 1.5 Gbps, the Adtran only has four 1 Gbps ports! Meaning, in bridge mode, I’ll never get the full 1.5 Gbps I’m paying for. And if I’m being really picky, even if I was using this thing as an all-in-one modem/router/AP, I’d be very lucky to ever saturate that connection over the Adtran’s WiFi 6 AP.

So the new question became: can I just ditch the Adtran entirely and plug the fiber directly into my UniFi controller? After some Reddit reading (thank you arth33) and some experimentation, I figured out how this can be done.

First, a quick primer on some terminology:

• GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) is the technology standard used by fiber optic networks to deliver broadband internet to your home.
• The demarcation point is a conceptual boundary point where your ISP’s fiber network ends and your own network begins.
• An ONT (Optical Network Terminal) is the physical device that receives and processes the fiber optic signals from the GPON network.
• SFP+ (Small Form-factor Pluggable) is a type of transceiver module where the specific transceiver technology is inside the module itself rather than inside the device you are connecting to.

In my case, because Teksavvy resells Bell’s fiber in Toronto, the Bell technician brought a pre-configured SFP+ GPON ONT with him, and installed it into the Adtran that Teksavvy had mailed me earlier.

With the fiber connection working well on the Adtran with stock settings, it was time to try bridge mode, so that my old UniFi Dream Machine Pro could continue managing my network. Following arth33’s instructions, I got this working well, albeit at 1Gbps.

New Hardware

But oh man, what an ugly mess. Intolerable, really. I need to be honest with myself - I don’t have space for a proper rack so I should stop buying rack-sized gear. And the giant Adtran doens’t help things much. Lucky for me, Ubiquiti sells smaller wall-mountable gear, like the Unifi Cloud Gateway Fiber (bought one!) and the Flex 2.5G PoE switch (bought two!).

The Cloud Gateway Fiber is a nice little gateway. It even has two SFP+ ports! We’re almost there! But but but… the SFP+ ports support either 1G or 10G modules. No 2.5G! And you can guess what speed Bell’s SFP+ GPON ONT runs at: 2.5G. 😖😖😖

So: enter a new piece of gear (recommended by several redditors): a 2.5G SFP Port Transceiver Media Converter. The one I link to here is what I’m using, but I’m sure there are others that’d do the same thing. This little box takes a 2.5G SPF+ module (the Bell ONT in my case) and converts that to 2.5G ethernet. And the Fiber Gateway just happens to have a 2.5G WAN ethernet port (port 5) - perfect!

Here’s a hot tip that took me way too long to figure out: there is a little itty bitty switch to the left of the ethernet port. In my picture here, you can see it is set to “off”, which is what we want. What is it turning off exactly? Buried in the product description, I found this sentence: “Equipped with a simple manual switch for easy toggling between SFP 2.5G/RJ45 100/1000/2500 adaptive and SFP 1G/RJ45 1000M modes.” We want adaptive, so we switch the fixed 1G speed off. The module confirms that it is indeed connected at 2.5G with one of its little green lights.

One final note: make sure you’re media converter is connected to port 5, as its preconfigured as a WAN port.

New Unifi Configs

With everything connected at the right speeds, I then had to configure my Unifi gateway to handle the PPPoE authentication (which the Adtran would normally handle). Teksavvy’s instructions were a bit sparse and, in my case, missing some key instructions, so here are my working configurations:

The key parts from the configs above are:

1. Specify a VLAN ID of 40 (as per Teksavvy’s instructions)
2. Don’t use a QoS tag.
3. Clone the modem’s MAC address. Teksavvy didn’t mention this requirement, but my connection didn’t work without it!
4. Select PPPoE for the IPv4 connection.
5. Add the PPPoE username and password that came pre-saved in the Adtran modem Teksavvy sent you.

The MAC address of the modem can be found only from the web configuration interface in the Adtran modem itself. So I just had to plug the modem in with nothing else connected to it, connect to it via WiFi (with the credentials on a sticker on the modem’s bottom) and browse to http://192.168.100.1/. Sign in (username and password is also on the sticker). Navigate to Network > Ethernet WAN and copy the MAC address. Then navigate to IPv4 Configuration and copy the username and password. Unfortunately, the password is obscured in an HTML element that doesn’t show its value by default 😖😖😖. If you are a software developer (and you must be if you’ve read this far!), just open your inspector and change this field to a regular text field, and voila, there is your password in plain text.

You have another option, however! Just start a web chat with Teksavvy’s helpful support folks! After authenticating with them on their site, a rep gave me my username and password in just a couple minutes.

And that’s it! My gateway was internet-connected after about 30 seconds of enabling these configurations. And the speed was finally what I’d paid for:

New Installation

A setup this slick deserved better than to be crammed into a spider-web infested plywood cabinet, so I spent some time (perhaps too much time) designing and building a custom-fit cabinet for my new gear.

I wanted a cabinet that I could make changes to easily in the future, without too much disassembly and without making things uglier as my gear changes (see the “before” pic above for an example of that 😬). But most importantly, I wanted something that would bring a smile to my face any time I looked at it - even if that isn’t all that often.

With a free 3D scanning app on my phone, I scanned the incredibly un-square cabinet enclosure to get some precise measurements. I imported this into SolidWorks, cleaned it up a bit, and set to work designing an enclosure that would beautifully frame this new Unifi gear. It is made of laser-cut 2.75mm birchwood panels, with a regular slot pattern for easy mounting of equipment. 3D printed brackets, each one uniquely designed to match its position inside the rough cabinet, hold all the panels in place. Black wafer screws secure everything together, and each panel can be quickly removed and replaced. Each network component had a custom designed mount printed - one that would let me slot it into the panels at precise spacings, keeping edges aligned and spacing consistent.

Two LED light fixtures frame the mounting panels and are obscured by some vertical valence pieces. These pieces do double-duty as a power cable hiding raceway, leading all of the power cables down to a custom-trimmed 4-gang outlet box. Not shown is an 1500 VA APC Back-UPS Pro uninteruptable power supply, which feeds the outlet box and can keep everything running for about 45 minutes without mains power.

All of the data cables were purchased at the exact length I needed (6 inch for the patch panel, 18” for the switch and gateway.) I designed and printed custom cable mounts for all the different cable diameters to keep them neat and tidy.