Sky ADSL Broadband with a Cisco router

Problem

Consumer routers suck, plain and simple. Personally I'm used to the rich features Cisco routers provide. Of course, I am biased, however it seems a common goal to get broadband connections working on Cisco routers.

ADSL connections are a pain, they're usually finicky and difficult to troubleshoot. This post contains the configuration required for a sky ADSL connection.

Solution / Configuration

Below is the required configuration (non complete for security reasons).

ATM Interface:

interface ATM0
 no ip address
 no ip redirects
 no ip unreachables
 no ip proxy-arp
 no atm ilmi-keepalive
 pvc 0/38 
  encapsulation aal5mux ppp dialer
  dialer pool-member 1
 !
!

Dialer Interface:

interface Dialer0
 bandwidth 8000
 ip address negotiated
 no ip redirects
 no ip unreachables
 no ip proxy-arp
 ip mtu 1492
 ip nat outside
 ip virtual-reassembly in
 encapsulation ppp
 ip tcp adjust-mss 1460
 dialer pool 1
 dialer idle-timeout 0
 dialer-group 1
 ppp authentication chap callin
 ppp chap hostname [email protected]
 ppp chap password 7 0502081C354D4205
 ppp ipcp dns request
 no cdp enable
!
!

This is the meat of the configuration required for Sky ADSL. Obviously other configuration is required for LAN services etc. NAT is also required however "standard" overload configuration is fine. Other configuration is out of the scope of this post.

The specifics of this connection are the username & password required for the connection to come online. The PPP credentials are as follows:

Username: [email protected]
Password: install

This username and password appears universal to Sky broadband, even new installations. I am assuming that Sky performs authentication based on the same mechanism that BT uses - the subscribers phone number / connection.