Vodafone Connect router crashing several times a day - how to resolve?

[sirvelo]

I moved to Vodafone from BT about a week ago, just to save money. The BT service, using my own Asus router, was faster than its advertised 80Mbps speed, and was 100% solid. Zero downtime logged.

Since moving to Vodafone (having said to the sales person that I'd be using my own router - he never said I couldn't), I now find myself forced to use the Vodafone Connect router, which:

1) Connect router crashes at least daily. This is not WAN down, this is some kind of router reset. The intranet (LAN/wifi) still functions, yet the router web interface (192.168.1.1) is unavailable (indicating probably nothing wrong with WAN), and there is no Internet connection while it restarts. Also of coure the WAN infrastructure is all the same as it was when BT provided the rock solid service.

2) The Event Logs only show me the last 60 or so entries, so at least effectively, restarts on every reboot. AND, the timestamp of the logs reset to Nov 2016 every reboot until the reboot completes. Hence I can only really say the router reboots "at least" daily - the logs never get as far as showing a full day without a Nov 2016 reset. It's 11:53am now, and I know it's crashed at least twice since 08:30. But with no logs from the crashes, no way of identifying the cause. Which is 90% what logs are for!

This post relates to firmware 5.4.8.1.291.1.30.1.6, but from reading around, this lack of reliability has been around a while, exact same symptom, so likely no hardware fault with my specific router.  Is there any way of getting the logs to show more entries so I can try to resolve this, or at least feed those logs back to a tech team to try to resolve it? Last night's crash was mid-paypal payment, never a compfortable time for an outage.

(Ideally of course, I'd rather just be allowed to use my own reliable Asus router... I do believe I was miss-sold this contract by the sales rep saying nothing when I said that was my intention...)

[sirvelo]

In case it helps, my WAN connection speed (DSL Bit rate) throughout all reboots has stayed the same 79987 Downstream, 20000 Upstream. On BT with my Asus router, it was nearly 100000 Downstream. So the reboots do not seem to be part of some initial settling speed negotiation. (I'm not complaining about 100M->80M, the speed is fine for the price). I am also well within my 30 days cooling off, and have identified a cost effective alternative.

[Sarah_T]

@sirvelo

Where is your router currently located? Make sure that it's in a wide, open space with no obstructions.

Are you finding that the router crashes at certain points of the day?

[sirvelo]

Hi @Sarah_T,

Thanks for replying. This issue is the router crashing, and the logs being unusable. The machine I use most (and observed most the crashes on) is RJ45 connected anyway. So not a wifi problem, so the router location is irrelevant (unless I've chosen to site it inside a microwave oven - which I haven't). It actually is in a very wide open space anyway.

If the logs worked, I could tell you when it's crashing. But because they reset on every crash, I have no idea. All I can say for certainty is I've seen it crash multiple times in the morning, and I've seen it crash in the evening. It could be crashing every hour regardless. Fix the logs, and we can find out... or let me use my own router, and I won't care any more.

25 days left on cooling off period, and counting...

[paulcormack]

@sirvelo - Have you disabled uPNP on the device.   This wont help with your logs but might just help with your crashing.  It seems they are using a buggy uPNP implementation, as quite a few people have reported disconnects/crashes I think caused my mem/cpu spikes on the device and uPNP seems to be but one of the guilty party.

So unless you desperate need to discover your router using uPNP it might be worth thinking about disabling it and see if that give you some stability.

[sirvelo]

Thanks @paulcormack, I'll try that after letting vodafone have a wee investigation. I've still got 25 or so days, but have plans for a viable alternative, so may not wait that long.

[Colleen]

@sirvelo As we’ll need to access your account to look into this, which requires personal information - we can’t discuss the investigation on the Community, as this will breach our security policy.

Once we’ve looked into this and reached a resolution, we’ll be happy for you to update this thread with the outcome, for our other users.

[CWTideswell]

I agree with @paulcormack, the only time in the last 18 months the Connect router actually became unstable with a few crashes was when I enabled uPNP with a USB stick in the port.

[sirvelo]

Okay, last crash was about an hour ago, disabled upnp now. See if it stays up for as long as a day... I do use upnp, but I guess I can just enable it when I need it, or go back to manual port forwarding. Thanks @paulcormack, @CWTideswell. I'll report back result in a day or two.

[sirvelo]

@paulcormack, @CWTideswell: Well that didn't help, just home this evening, and there's been another reboot within the last half hour, 21:33 or so. There may have been several during the day, but with broken logs, no way of knowing unless I script up a ping on a PC or something - too much effort for something that doesn't need to be my problem tbh. Why oh why tie customers to using such unreliable kit?
Vodafone started to authenticate me for tech support by email (DOB etc), then sent another email saying to call them. I'll call them tomorrow.