New BB supplier router issues.
 

We have just signed up to a new, cheaper, BB supplier and received their "Award Winning Router". I don't know what Award it won but our experience suggests it is not for its WiFi capability. What we are finding is that after less than an hour of use the data stream just stops flowing to however many devices we have connected. The indicator LEDs on the router carry on showing all of the greens and flashing to show activity but nothing is happening at the devices. The devices all show WiFi to be connected but we pages stop loading, music and video streams show the circle chasing itself round for ever.........

The connected devices are some or all of a recent Dell laptop running Win 10, an ancient Dell laptop running Linux Mint, a Samsung laptop running Win 8 and finally a Samsung tablet and 2 Samsung phones running Android versions various.

The router only arrived last week ready for BB switchover on Monday. Notification of the switchover came and the old router carried on doing a good job. We were informed that the actual switchover could be at any time up to midnight so we carried on using the old router until bedtime. On Tues morning I swapped over the routers and the "Award Winning" one booted up, locked onto the internet and off we went. About 15 minutes into a Zoom maths lesson the whole lot just stopped in the way described above. Not knowing what was going on and having seen Openreach working along the road I took the easy option and used my mobile to run a hotspot and got the Zoom lesson back up.

After the lesson finished I called the BB customer service team, got through directly, and a very helpful chap asked me to reboot the router and he ran some tests after which he tweaked some settings remotely and thought he had solved the issue. About an hour later, as my wife was preparing to do an on line games sesison the router stopped again. All of the LEDs carried on showing green and a VOIP phone call carried on working so I called the service desk again. They were not able to effect any change in the time before the gaming session was due to be hosted by my wife so I cut the man short and connected up the old BB supplier's router and we got back on line. We gave the new router one more try later in the day and the service help made some more tweaks, not sure what. The first theory that WiFi channel contention might be an issue, it isn't, we can barely see anyone else's WiFi from in the house and the sig strengths are low. During the night I plugged the Award Winning back in and it seemed to have idled all night, my phone connected tro the WiFi when I awoke and data flowed. It didn't last, less than an hour later, just as my wife was going to join a Zoom maths session it all fell over again. A quick swap back to the old router and maths went ahead. I called the help desk, reported what had happened since my previous call and they decided to send a replacement router.

It came today. It behaves in exactly the same way as the other one did. After nearly an hour data stopped flowing, web pages stopped refreshing etc. I called again. Spoke to the 6th different person but the notes in our account were well done and I didn't need to repeat myself. They asked be to do a factory reset on the router, we checked channel conflict, again, none detected. It worked for about 35 mins before it stopped fetching data. From tomorrow we are going to be away for 10 days so I rejected the offer of another Award Winning router........

To be picked up again in 2 weeks ish.

I remember something similar happening with a previous router and BB supplier...... but I can't remember what was done to sort the issue in the end. I think it may have been a channel setting change or security change but can't really remember.

Anyone?

Rans6......

Many broadband (I assume wired as you don't mention fibre and its not low cost) cabinets have the DSLAM set to test and adjust /optimise the connection speed many times during the first week or two of a new provision /connection. Each new speed setting may involve a re-sync and service break
Usually it works it out and stabilises within an hour or so but if there's a line issue (intermittent connection maybe) or it gets switched off at night etc it hunts for a few days and may end up with a stupid result.

You low cost provider ought to know this as it's been the case for decades.

The network operator can access the cabinet and ask it what's going on but the re-sellers often can't or can but don't train their staff well enough for a service rep to understand the report. Your old router if still accepted will try to sync at whatever rate it had settled on - possibly lower than you are currently testing settings around on the new one

But leave it on for your 10 days and if its not resolved there's a line /cabinet fault to report and there should be a good long error log by then

Does the router have two frequencies (2.4 and 5 ghz) set to use the same password. I had a problem with devices changing frequencies and then downloads would stop. Setting the router to use separate passwords for each frequency and/or setting each device to use only one frequency solved the problem for me.

We've been away for a couple of weeks so I have not had time to play with the router until this week. When we came back to here I brought a TP-Link wireless router with me. This is a 4 port plus WiFi unit that connects by ethernet cable. I plugged this into the award winning router and pushed all of our WiFi devices to connect to it rather than the award winning router our internet provider issued. This stayed working properly for 3 days.

Yesterday evening, as a test, I pushed my old laptop back onto the dodgy router and the WiFi worked for about an hour before locking out, as it has before. The other devices in the house carried on connecting to the TP-Link WiFi and data flowed properly. This morning the WiFi was still connecting to the dodgy router but still no data flowed.

Leaving it locked out, I called the techy help. They tried to interogate it from their end and they could see the TP-Link and Vonage phone ethernet connections but then they rebooted the router and cut off my phone call. I called back. Another customer techy chap then decided to separate the 2.4GHz and 5GHz logins and thought he had fixed our issues. Thanks for suggesting this DonC,. He hadn't. After 40 mins the WiFi stopped issuing data despite the connection to the computer showing 80% signal connected. I called again. They looked at it from their end again and asked me to unplug my TP-Link router. This caused my phone call to drop due to my mobile using Voip as the mobile network coverage is poor in the house. I put the knotted hanky on my head and put my left foot in the bucket of water (Mony P solution) to make the mobile work and called them again. This time the techy messed with the DNS settings in the router and we are currently back up running the WiFi on the provider's router, 40 mins and counting.

I don't understand what is going on, I think the DNS settings are set to some defaults when the router is sent out but apparently they don't work for everyone??? My understanding is that the DNS settings are a look up which ties apparent URLs seen by browsers to an actual hardware address on the internet and they are all stored on a server(s). Why some routers would need one DNS server and some use another I can't get my mind around. Even more confusing is why one server is good for up to an hour and then stops working and that they think another one will be any better. The techy also failed to answer why the selection of a particular DNS would stop WiFi data from flowing from the internet but allow the data to carry on flowing through the ethernet to any of our devices.

I spoke too soon, it has all ground to a halt again.

Plusnet have asked for their modem/router back.

Rans6...........

Sorry to hear about your continued router woes. I did have an issue with the EE DNS servers and web pages would load slow or not at all, I changed the DNS servers to the Google ones (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) and things worked much better. Each device could be affected differently depending which web address each one is trying to open.

We have had 5 calls to the techy lot today and they have worked to the end of their standard solution checklist, none of which has made any difference. At call 5 the techy changed the bandwidth of the WiFi channels narrower. Made no difference. I did notice that the WiFi stayed connected even though there was no internet data flow however I could still access the router admin console via WiFi. Most odd.

They have escalated it to their experts..... who are looking at downloading an updated OS to the router sometime tomorrow when we can manage without it for a while.

Ongoing..

Rans6........................

Even if you get your award winning router working properly, running a separate WiFi access point is not a bad idea. I have one; all my personal devices connect the remote one while my TV, Smart Sockets and other IoT stuff connects directly to the broadband access point. This goes some way towards preventing a Sky box or 'smart' toaster getting access to the personal data on your phone.

whoopee, they have fixed it, we think. This afternoon, after a short phone call from the techy's they downloaded a new code into our router. It went off line for about a minute, flashed all of its lights and came back up. It has stayed up for nearly nine hours now.....

I logged onto the router admin account and was greeted by a big bright coloured banner across the top of the dashboard proclaiming version number and development version not for release. It does seem to be doing the job so well that I feel that they must have been working on this and testing it for some time. I guess the problems we have had have been seen by others....

Rans6...........................