Potential Solution
I think I may have found a solution to all the ‘slow Gigacube loading page/DNS related issues’.
After doing some reading on these forums I started to look at APN settings in my 5G Gigacube (Huawei 5G CPE Pro). In particular, the ‘IP type’ setting. So… I went into Network Settings—>Mobile Network—>Internet Connection—>APN List and saw a list of APNs, with the default being ‘Other Pay monthly’. Given that you can’t edit these APNs, I decided to create a new one, with the following settings which now include the Cloudflare DNS:
Profile name: Internet (this can be anything I think)
Set as Default Profile: Checked (this gets selected by default but make sure it’s checked)
User name: web
Password: web
Authentication: PAP
IP type: IPv4 & IPv6
APN: wap.vodafone.co.uk
Set DNS server manually: Checked
Primary IPv4 DNS server: 1.1.1.1
Secondary IPv4 DNS server: 1.0.0.1
Primary IPv6 DNS server: 2606:4700:4700::1111
Secondary IPv6 DNS server: 2606:4700:4700::1001
Click ‘Save’ and I don’t even think you need to restart router. Thats it!!
I’ve been running with this now for an hour. I am going to keep an eye on it over the next hours/days, and will report back status, but so far so good. All of the above issues are now gone. 🤞
So it perhaps seems that the APN's DNS settings override anything that is set in Network Settings—>Ethernet—>Dynamic IP.
TL;DR
I received 5G Gigacube (Huawei 5G CPE Pro) on Thursday. I’m in a 4G only area but it still works (a story for a different day).
The network signal is great and 4G speeds are so much better than my landline ADSL connection. I’m in a rural area and hence why I wanted mobile broadband.
Signal:
RSRQ -7.0dB
RSRP -82dBm
RSSI -63dBm
SINR 16dB
Speedtest.net Results:
Server: Mauritius Telecom Ltd - London (id = 17418)
ISP: Vodafone
Latency: 33.02 ms (6.78 ms jitter)
Download: 54.80 Mbps (data used: 62.1 MB)
Upload: 29.14 Mbps (data used: 39.3 MB)
Packet Loss: 0.0%
Result URL: https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/fd18a191-2bf7-4a29-94d9-e400cfefac46
PingPlotter also showed a very stable connection over a long term.
My issues were:
- Web pages taking an age to load (Chrome dev tools showed delays with ‘Wait (TTFB)’ and also DNS resolution
- Apps such as BBC Sport on wifi connected devices taking up to a minute to load, and sometimes even timing out
- Running Speedtest app on iPhone was taking a long time grabbing an available server
No issues with:
- Streaming services running on Apple TV
- Video calls (Google, FaceTime etc.)
My home network consists of Gigacube 5G (with wifi turned off) and the WAN port used to connect 4 different wifi access points throughout the house using Powerline adapters. Note: this infrastructure worked perfectly with my old ADSL connection, so I know this wasn’t the issue. Furthermore, I connected directly to the Gigacube to cut out the chance that it could be Powerline/wifi issues.
I tried manually setting the DNS to Cloudflare in the Gigagcube under Network Settings—>Ethernet—>Dynamic IP but this didn’t seem to work.
I also tried turning my Gigacube into a ‘modem only’ (Bridge Mode) and let my home network router do DHCP, NAT etc. However, I was getting ‘Double NAT’ issues, as apparently Vodafone won’t let you do this. (Terrible, but again I digress.)
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