TL;DR for anyone landing here from search:
- HT does offer ONT-only fiber — ask specifically for this when signing up, they don’t always advertise it
- PPPoE username = yourusername@htnet-dsl, not just yourusername
- VLAN ID = 100 on your WAN interface
- MTU = 1492
- Support will not proactively tell you either of the first two. Save yourself the phone call.
Posting this for anyone searching in the future. The only useful info I found was buried in a forum.bug.hr thread, and even that took digging.
The setup most people don’t know is possible:
When you sign up for HT (Hrvatski Telekom) fiber, you don’t have to take their standard router/ONT combo box. You can request ONT only — just the fiber-to-ethernet terminal, no HT router. This means:
- No fighting with their firmware, no forced bridge/gateway mode workarounds, no double NAT
- Your own router (mine’s an ASUS RT-BE90U) connects directly to the ONT and handles everything — WiFi, VLANs, QoS, all of it
- Full control over your network the way you’d expect if you’re used to BYO equipment
I specifically requested this to avoid having to mesh or gateway my own high-end router behind their combo unit. It’s been fantastic — full control, none of the compromises that come with running your own equipment behind an ISP-locked box.
The two things HT support did NOT tell me, that you need to get this working:
- PPPoE username format. They will give you a username like yourusername. That is incomplete. The actual PPPoE login needs to be:
[yourusername]@htnet-dsl
Without the @htnet-dsl suffix, authentication just fails silently and you’ll assume something’s wrong with your router or the fiber itself.
- VLAN ID. HT runs internet, IPTV (MaxTV), and VoIP over the same physical fiber line using separate VLAN tags. Your router needs to be told which tag is internet traffic. Set your WAN VLAN ID to: 100
Without this, your router either doesn’t see the right traffic or gets a confusing mix of all three services untagged. This field exists on basically every prosumer/enthusiast router (ASUS, Ubiquiti, MikroTik, pfSense/OPNsense, etc.) under WAN or Internet Connection settings — it’s just off by default because HT’s own combo router has this baked in at the firmware level, invisible to you.
Also worth setting your MTU to 1492 (not the default 1500) since PPPoE has 8 bytes of overhead — this can prevent random intermittent stalls on larger packets even after the connection is technically “up.”
Performance, for reference (Split):
- Download: ~950 Mbit/s
- Upload: ~450 Mbit/s
- Ping: ~5ms average
This is on their FTTH product, ONT-only, no HT router in the chain.