Intermittent downtime, websites not loading and apps not working

[ukandyh]

After too much unreliability with the BT connection I decided to get the 500Mbps Fibre but I'm constantly running into different issues and wondering if there's something fundamentally wrong or some config change needed.

Symptoms include:

- Good wifi but no internet
- Internet dropping randomly
- Some websites refusing connection
- Gaming (Call of Duty) not able to connect to servers
- Work devices failing to connect to online resources

To work around it I'm connecting via my old 4G dongle router where everything seems to work all the time just not with the speeds I would get with the Fibre.

So, apart from the Internet connection being so unreliable it seems like the Vodafone server (or City Fibre equipment) are implementing some sort of firewall or port blocking that's causing me a lot of problems when the Internet connection is actually working.

Is this normal? 

[network123]

Catching up on this forum, I've seen a lot of people complaining about CF routing. Are you using a 3rd party router? Are you losing internet connection wired to the router as well? 

[ukandyh]

I'm using the one which was provided, haven't swapped it at this point as it was only recently installed and I assumed it would be fit for purpose.

I can't connect directly to it wired as my office is in a different part of the house.

It just seems very random and even when the connection is good the connectivity and disruption to my devices reaching servers is preventing me using it for most work purposes and personally preventing the only game I play from working reliably on it (it was working at first but recently just doesn't allow the game to reach the servers) so it feels like something has changed.

I've set up my old Linksys as a bridge to connect to the VF wireless and give my wired devices a connection in my office and I see the same with that as with my main PC directly accessing the Wifi (I have the VF Wifi extender near my office so the signal is always strong, just often no internet on the end of it)

[Jayach]

The only blocking Vodafone do is their content controls, and they are DNS based so using different DNS servers will bypass them.

Just recently there were a lot of posts complaining of issues such as you describe. It seems to have cleared up now but was considered to be a problem with some dynamic IP addresses and was cured by getting a static IP.

If you want to try that, the easiest way would be by asking on live chat: https://www.vodafone.co.uk/bbservcd/