Vodafone Connect Router issues

[abates85]

My vodafone broadband was installed today and setting up my home ive come across the following issues.

1. My Laptop connected on the Wifi 5Ghz channel cannot see my Server connected by LAN Cable, if i disable the 5ghz band i can see the server fine but it reduces the functionality of the router.

2. I cannot connect to a device via port forwarding using the external router IP from within the network. however i can access the device from outside the network.

3. My fibre broadband speed is significantly slower (28MB) than the service i was recieving with sky (40MB) even thoughi was promised full (76MB) speed

has anyone else had these issues and can provide assistance ?

[florca]

@mw8523 - Scratching my head here...  Was actually asking whether you can Ping between Wired and WiFi devices, but suspect the answer is probably no.  Have you disabled the Guest WiFi SSID(s), Filtering, UPnP? Can you see all (any?) devices across the Wired / WiFi divide in a device ARP cache on either side? Not optimistic, but maybe try manually setting an ARP cache entry (mode arp -s) on the Wired Pi for a WiFi device MAC addr and see if that gains L2 visibility?

Can only say that my Wired and WiFi devices (both using only the VF Connect router) can interwork fine on this firmware, albeit with the router configured for a bare minimum of services. Don't have any other AP's connected, but don't see how that would change things. I did change the DHCP ranges and also set up the Pi to have a "Fixed" DHCP-assigned address on the router, so that may be worth a shot?

Beyond that I'm with @MrWhite - either abandon the VF router as an AP and/or stick an Ebay £25 HG612-3B in Bridge mode in front of the WNDR3700 and use the Netgear with OpenWRT as your NAT Router...

Frustrating!

[mw8523]

Ah right - I tried pinging my raspi from my iPhone; it works both ways and with large packets if the iPhone is close to my WAC120; but when I move close to the VF router it stops.

As for my other config:

• I changed the DHCP range
• I changed the IP address of the VF router
• I have UPnP enabled (need it for my Internet radio)
• only main WiFi is enabled
• WPS is switched off
• WiFi is set to use the same SSID, channel, and bandwidth per band as the APs

[florca]

Not sure this will solve your problems (see below..), but one observation is that unless you live in an area completely flooded with competing WiFi (in which case life will be tough whatever) then you should absolutely set up each of your three AP's to use a different non-overlapping channel on each band from the adjacent APs - ideally use channels 1, 6 and 11 on 2.4GHz, but worth doing a quick survey (WiFi Analyzer on Android is quite good, Apple I think have removed the ability to do this on iPhones) to find the optimum setup to avoid conflicts with neighbours. Ch 36, 100, 149 good choices on 5GHz, or use "Auto" as the 5GHz range / penetration is a lot lower.  In general use a 20MHz channel width on 2.4GHz and 40 or 80 on 5GHz.

Beyond this - I think I can guess what's wrong, why it works for me but not you, but not sure there's an easy way to solve the problem, which is pretty clearly (if I'm right) a dumb bug in the VF router firmware. Seems to me that the router is incapable of handing over properly between APs (or at least between its own internal AP and external ones connected via the LAN) such that when you move from one of the external ones to the VF AP the router (or at least its Ethernet L2 Switch component) does not properly re-register the WiFi MAC, such that the Ethernet Switch still sends traffic to the external AP.

I suspect that if you turn off the external APs, maybe wait a while for the Switch ARP cache to age and then re-boot your iPhone within range of the VF router then you have some chance of it working (and at least proving the theory). Probably not a good idea to reboot or reset the VF Router to avoid Openreach DLM downgrading your linespeed... As I don't have any external APs I won't see this problem.

I don't for one moment think that this will still work once the external APs are re-enabled, but at least it might confirm the problem.  As a general point, clean, fast and seamless handover between multiple APs of different makes is often a bit hit-and-miss, and for a good result it may be worth looking at something like an Ubiquiti UniFi setup, which is designed for this type of usage from the outset.

[florca]

Also - This may be worth looking at? For various reasons I've actually split my SSIDs, but I think the general advice is good...

https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/basics/wireless-basics/32751-snb-answer-guy-how-many-ssids-is-too-ma...

[mw8523]

Thanks for the SNB link.

I'm using the same channels per band across all APs because the APs don't use WiFi to connect back to the router since they are wired to the router. Also, it's essentially just me using the WiFi; most other devices are wired; WiFi is only used by my phone, my wife's phone (rarely), my Logitech Harmony hub, an Internet radio (rarely), and an iPad.

The 2.4 GHz space is busy although 5 GHz isn't (the top 5 highlighted ones are mine):

I'll give it a try later today to run the 5 GHz band on different channels.

[MrWhite]

When running your tests, did you keep the VF router wifi on?  Have you tried roaming to and from the VF router?  Does the connectivity remain, or do you run back into issues again?

For my part, I've always found roaming back to pick up the VF router wifi is where I lose connection.  My AP (Unifi) always reconnects without issue (as does the old Netgear router I'm using as an AP)

[mw8523]

@MrWhite - I never had issues with connections being lost and roaming works for me; my issue was purely with not being able to reach LAN devices when using the VF router WiFi; but since I followed florca's suggestion, this is now working as well

As for my tests: WiFi on my VF router remained switched on (main WiFi at 5 GHz only)

[mw8523]

@florca - I have now changed the 5 GHz channels on my APs and router:

• VF router channel 36 bandwidth 40 GHz full power
• WAC120 AP channel 44 bandwidth 40 GHz full power
• OpenWRT AP channel 52 bandwidth 40 GHz 5% power

So far all is working well; I had to go through the routine you suggested though after the channel changes, i.e.

1. switch off APs
2. reboot iPhone near VF router
3. switch APs back on

Another WiFi scan (highlighed ones are mine):

I noticed, my VF router is reported to be in Germany (DE) - strange.

[mw8523]

I might switch back to using the same channel across all APs as I noticed that roaming is no longer as seamless as it was before; for example, when using the Logitech Harmony app and editing activities, it tried reconnecting to my SSID as I was roaming around the house and in the process lost any edits I made before the reconnecting; I'll check if the same happens again tonight.

What exactly is the reason why I should use different channels with different APs and the same SSID? I thought it was to maximise performance in an environment where many users may connect at the same time.

But in my case it's essentially just me roaming and any other wireless clients on my network require little bandwidth. 

So if using the same channel improves roaming at the potential cost of performance I'd rather go for that as the performance hit in my case will be negligible.

[MrWhite]

Using different channels is to reduce interference between the access points and neighbours routers.  If you're getting a better experience using the same, then revert back to that as there's no 'hard' rule that they should be different.