Just putting this here because it would have saved me a few hours.

If you’re setting up your fiber internet connection by Deutsche Telekom using their official modem1 but want to bring your own router2, you have to use the internet setting PPPoE on your router. You will need the login details for that. Telekom told me they send these by letter to everyone by default, but I didn’t receive any. If you call them and ask for the login details however, they can quickly provide them as an encrypted PDF to which they will send the password as an SMS.

Why did this take so much time for me?

  • I thought by using the official modem, the login process would already have been taken care of. I didn’t know there were login details that I need and I tried running the router in “dynamic” WAN mode.
  • Nobody at Telekom that I spoke to has ever worked with a TP-Link router and they only knew how it would work with a FritzBox, where they don’t seem to use the official term PPPoE in the interface and they may have some auto-configuration going on for those, where you actually don’t need any login details.
  • I had to ping-pong between the Telekom hotline and TP-Link hotline, sending back and forth pieces of information and waiting on hold for some time, every time.

I hope this information saves someone some time. Good luck!

  1. Glasfasermodem 2 in my case ↩︎

  2. TP-Link Archer AX23 in my case, but other companies might also use the official technical names for the protocols used ↩︎