Okay, so here's a weird one for the tech-team. The house I live in has no Vodafone signal at all and with 2 teenagers, 5 iPhones and 3 IPads in the household that's a real pain. I have BT infinity fibre business broadband (business, because I need a fixed IP address)
About 3 years ago, I bought an SS2 - Fantastic - it solved my problems. In fact it worked so well I asked Vodafone if two would work on the same broadband connection. They said yes, so I bought another one. All was well and both worked well for months, then about 2 years ago they suddenly and randomly stopped working (at the exact same moment ) despite their being no obvious changes to my network or ISP.
During a very lengthy process, I then spent days (it felt like weeks) on the phone and on-line to second line tech teams, trying to get even one of the SS2s to work. The two SS2s were replaced with SS3s FOC by Vodafone and since then despite a lot of trying, they never worked. I was told by Vodafone that they would never work on PPoE ( but they had been working before ! ) I was told to map internal ports ( strange because if ports needed to be mapped – how did I ever get 2 to work at once ?) I activated, reactivated, waited 24hours more times than I could count and in the end …..gave up !
So, sitting on a shelf, I had two SS3's (1 18 months old and 1 was replaced under warranty last week) I have never managed to get them to work with my ISP. But then I read promising posts on this forum. They said that the new BT HomeHub4 works with the SS3, so I paid to upgrade ( I got an even newer HH5)
I installed the new hub, got my network up and running and connected to broadband. Everything looked good so I plugged in one SS3 and crossed my fingers. After quite a while with a red power light and a flashing white internet light, - success !!!!! FANTASTIC !!!! - IT WORKED. I then tried the other SS3 and got the same result - 2 working SS3s. Life was looking good.
All was well, until I noticed that my email wasn’t working. Checking through I found that I had accidentally connected my HH5 to the Domestic BT infinity service, so I was operating under a randomly allocated IP address. Glad I had found the issue, I reconnected using my BT business login and password. All good, connection made, IP address restored to what it should be. Reset the two SS3s, and waited..........after a few minutes - arghhhh - the dreaded two orange flashing lights !! - retried several times, still no good.
So, as I had had that initial success, I re-connected the HH5, using the retail username - the SS3s leapt into life. I reconnected on business username - no go. I played with this for a while, trying the SS3s plugged in at various locations in my network and every time the SS3s worked on retail but not on business. I then tried connecting on retail and left the SS3s plugged in, while I (very quickly) clicked the disconnect button on the HH5 from retail and reconnected on business on the fly ! Strangely the SS3s seemed not to notice - they were happily sitting there with their 2 lights glowing. Stranger and stranger - I tried making calls on my iPhones and they both worked fine - Okay that seemed like success to me.
Unfortunately after a few hours, first one and then the second SS3 dropped back to their obstinate 2 flashing orange lights status. Having experimented, the time taken to drop off the Vodafone connection seems random but eventually they do drop out and I have to reset my HH5 to retail to get them working again.
I seem to have to choose between a Vodafone signal, or my fixed IP address but I can’t have both.
Now I am not a complete luddite but this is beyond me. I've spoken to BT and they kindly say they can't help me because the SS3 is not a product they support, although they did say that the 'back-end' on their Openreach network is exactly the same, whether it's retail of business !!
Anyone got any thoughts ?
I am very willing to try alternatives and I guess I am in a reasonably unique position, to act as a bit of a test bed for the BT infinity, Vodafone Sure Signal issues that litter these boards.
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