2Degrees 4G Broadband prevents new connections

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Cydonian

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#315305 1-Jul-2024 14:29

Hi,

I have been using 2Degrees 4G Broadband for a few months now and am wondering if the issue that I experience is normal, or if someone knows how to resolve.

Every now and then when I open a new browser window and navigate to a new page, I may get a cannot find page error. If I refresh a few times it may load. At this point, if I go to the mx515v (TP-Link router) status page and refresh, it sometimes says to "Please configure your DNS manually" and/or Internet Status is "Disconnected". This, in itself, is rather odd as existing internet connections on my PC may continue to work. If I then also try my AndroidTV it may fail to load and advise no internet available. If I refresh this a number of times, it may connect, otherwise I have to reboot the mx515v to get it to work again.

I am on the non-capped 4G Broadband plan with a 2Degrees supplied TP-Link mx515v modem.

They only way I have found to temporarily solve this, is to reboot the mx515v, which I may have to do 3 or 4 times a day. It is almost like there is a connection count limitation in the network, and rebooting clears the table and I am good to go again. By network, I mean either the mx515v or anything towards 2Degrees, given that the mx515v status page suggests that the same issue exists on that also.

There are only 2 persons in the household, no gaming, and generally only one TV streaming after work, or myself using a VPN during the day. I have about 10 internet enabled devices, as well as a few phones, but I don't believe these to be high use devices.

I did raise a fault with 2Degrees but it is very hard to find someone that can assist past the "reset back to factory defaults" type solution, which doesn't fix it.

If anyone has any ideas as to whether this is "normal", which would be a very sad state of affairs, or what I need to do to get it investigated and eventually resolved, I would be grateful.

SaltyNZ

8218 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

2degrees

Lifetime subscriber

#3255174 1-Jul-2024 14:34

I'm not familiar with the TP-Link device in question here but I do know that the Huawei modems we previously supplied couldn't deal with more than about 8 devices on the network before they would start losing their brains. What you are describing is pretty much exactly what I experienced when I trialled it.

'Get a better router' is not really the right answer here especially since it is officially forbidden to remove the SIM from the supplied device. So I cannot recommend it ... but that's what I did.

iPad Pro 11" + iPhone 15 Pro Max + 2degrees 4tw!

These comments are my own and do not represent the opinions of 2degrees.

Cydonian

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#3255182 1-Jul-2024 15:03

Thanks for the input.

For the last month I have had only 3 devices hard-wired to the 4G router to see if reducing the number of devices would fix it. If it did, I would then look at having 2 x 4G Broadband connections, but alas, even with only 3 devices the issue still occurs.

nedkelly

659 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#3255189 1-Jul-2024 15:46

Just a thought, do you have access to a Dedicated access point that you could connect via hardwire that can do its own DHCP server just to test if its DHCP related and if by having a DHCP server on a different range/Scope does anything?

richms

28168 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3255205 1-Jul-2024 16:32

Have seen issues with other connections before where the supplied piece of junk had nat limitations which lead to things like this happening if you had many things open or were torrenting or similar.

Solution was a non toy router that had a larger nat table.

Can you see any stats on the nat table on the router?

Richard rich.ms

Cydonian

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#3255436 2-Jul-2024 08:01

@nedkelly. I have found a spare router and have started to configure as suggested. So far all wired devices now get DHCP from new router and a single cable is connected to mx515v with static IP. Will see how that goes over next few days and gradually make changes to see what breaks it, or if this is a way forward.

@richms. I checked the GUI of the router and there isn't much in the way of stats, except CPU is <10% used and memory <40% used. There is also some traffic stats, but this is summarised to client IP Address. I also enabled SNMP agent on the router, and I don't see much there to do with Nat table either, but I will double-check when I get time. If you believe the blurb, and assuming I read it correctly, the mx515v is supposed to support around 250 devices so hopefully any required tables are large enough to cope, but yeah, what I am seeing could definitely be due to something like a NAT table filling up, as this could also explain why even the device itself couldn't perform a simple internet check and hence returned that the internet was down, while existing devices continued to work.