Broadband Outage

[Jeff Gaines]

Plusnet went down in he early house and has only just come back up despite
saying 11:55 all day!

Apparently there was some sort of upgrade at the exchange we are attached
to and it has taken pretty well all day to fix.

BT/EE offer a service whereby you fall back to a mobile signal (I think
via a SIM in the modem/router).

Anybody else provide a service like this? I am loathe to move from PN
because their service is usually good and I definitely don't want to move
back to BT whose service is appalling.

Could I do something on a DIY basis if I ditched the PN Modem 2 for
something else?

I found that RDP went down as well, don't understand that at all, my home
network was up just no Internet connection. I did manage to tether my
mobile to the laptop but that only give me Internet on that machine.

Suggestions welcome!

[Abandoned Trolley]

Post by Jeff Gaines
I found that RDP went down as well, don't understand that at all, my
home network was up just no Internet connection. I did manage to tether
my mobile to the laptop but that only give me Internet on that machine.
Suggestions welcome!

Is that USB tethering, or have you set up a local hot spot ?

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by Abandoned Trolley

I found that RDP went down as well, don't understand that at all, my home
network was up just no Internet connection. I did manage to tether my
mobile to the laptop but that only give me Internet on that machine.
Suggestions welcome!

Is that USB tethering, or have you set up a local hot spot ?

The 'phone calls it a hot spot, I connect to it just like any other WiFi.

[Abandoned Trolley]

Post by Jeff Gaines

Post by Abandoned Trolley

Post by Jeff Gaines
I found that RDP went down as well, don't understand that at all, my
home network was up just no Internet connection. I did manage to
tether  my mobile to the laptop but that only give me Internet on
that machine.
Suggestions welcome!

Is that USB tethering, or have you set up a local hot spot ?

The 'phone calls it a hot spot, I connect to it just like any other WiFi.

So .... what happens if you manage to get USB tethering to work ?


And then try to share the internet connection ?

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by Abandoned Trolley

Post by Jeff Gaines

Post by Abandoned Trolley

Post by Jeff Gaines
I found that RDP went down as well, don't understand that at all, my
home network was up just no Internet connection. I did manage to tether 
my mobile to the laptop but that only give me Internet on that machine.
Suggestions welcome!

Is that USB tethering, or have you set up a local hot spot ?

The 'phone calls it a hot spot, I connect to it just like any other WiFi.

So .... what happens if you manage to get USB tethering to work ?
And then try to share the internet connection ?

Only the laptop has WiFi, I'd need to either equip the desktops with WiFi
or find a way to share the laptop connection, not sure how to do that?

[Abandoned Trolley]

Post by Jeff Gaines
Only the laptop has WiFi, I'd need to either equip the desktops with
WiFi or find a way to share the laptop connection, not sure how to do that?

So ...


From some computer or laptop, make a USB connection to the phone and
then enable USB tethering - on my Samsung this is initiated on the phone

From the same computer or laptop, make a (preferably wired) Ethernet
connection to the rest of your LAN

The next stage (which is where it all fails miserably) would be to share
that internet connection, but for some reason I can’t see how to do that
on Win11, although I did manage to get this to work with a couple of W10
machines some time ago

I tried this last night and got nowhere, and bridging the 2 connections
doesn’t seem to help much either :-\

The other machines on the LAN need to be told that your tethered host is
now the default gateway

And ISTR at some point I may have manually edited the routing table on
the Win10 machine, in which case "route print" from the command line
might be a good place to start (you can add a persistent route to the
table and force everything down the USB interface))

And ... if you were looking for another rabbit hole to go down, try
finding out something about a registry key called either "IsRouter" or
"IsaRouter"

Basically, I am fairly certain that theres a way of making this work
without using WiFi at all

That should keep you out of the pub for a day or two, and I would be
interested to know if you manage to get it sorted out

[Daniel James]

Post by Jeff Gaines
BT/EE offer a service whereby you fall back to a mobile signal (I think
via a SIM in the modem/router).
Anybody else provide a service like this? I am loathe to move from PN
because their service is usually good and I definitely don't want to
move back to BT whose service is appalling.

BT own PlusNet so it's rather ironic that the PlusNet brewery holds
better piss-ups, but that does seem to be most people's experience.

It's all down to the router, really. Some routers allow you to have
multiple WAN connections that can be used as alternative connections to
the Internet or as parallel connections to increase bandwidth.

My own router (a Draytek) has a DSL connection, an Ethernet connection,
and USB ports that support (some models of) USB cellular modem. I don't
know what you have, but it possibly does the same.

The BT/EE fallback system probably uses a USB cellular modem.

The nice thing about having the fallback at the router is that you can
switch WAN-side connectivity without having to reconfigure any LAN-side
addresses. That can save a lot of faff if you use fixed IP addresses,
less so if all your devices rely on DHCP.

[Daniel James]

... USB ports that support (some models of) USB cellular modem.

Seems I'm a bit behind the times. There are routers these days that
contain integrated 5g modems ... at a price.

This sort of thing:

https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/52033-draytek-v2865l-5g-k/

[Chris]

Post by Jeff Gaines
Plusnet went down in he early house and has only just come back up despite
saying 11:55 all day!
Apparently there was some sort of upgrade at the exchange we are attached
to and it has taken pretty well all day to fix.
BT/EE offer a service whereby you fall back to a mobile signal (I think
via a SIM in the modem/router).
Anybody else provide a service like this? I am loathe to move from PN
because their service is usually good and I definitely don't want to move
back to BT whose service is appalling.
Could I do something on a DIY basis if I ditched the PN Modem 2 for
something else?

I've not done it myself, but yes. All you need is an appropriately
configured router and SIM card.

The biggest issue with DIY is that you need to pay for the SIM card
regardless of whether you're using it or not and have a service that's
suitable to take over your day-to-day usage. Could get expensive.

That's the advantage of the bundles.

Post by Jeff Gaines
I found that RDP went down as well, don't understand that at all, my home
network was up just no Internet connection.

So much these days calls home and assumes an always-on broadband connection
regardless whether it really needs it or not.

Post by Jeff Gaines
I did manage to tether my
mobile to the laptop but that only give me Internet on that machine.
Suggestions welcome!

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by Jeff Gaines
Could I do something on a DIY basis if I ditched the PN Modem 2 for
something else?

Many thanks for all the input :-)

It looks as if it could be an expensive option for what, so far, has been
rare outages but at least I have an idea what the options are.

Daniel James pointed out that Plusnet is a subsidiary of BT yet the
service levels are widely different. Plusnet's service centre is in
Yorkshire rather than Mumbai and much more helpful if you can manage the
accent!

[Chris]

Post by Jeff Gaines

Post by Jeff Gaines
Could I do something on a DIY basis if I ditched the PN Modem 2 for
something else?

Many thanks for all the input :-)
It looks as if it could be an expensive option for what, so far, has been
rare outages but at least I have an idea what the options are.
Daniel James pointed out that Plusnet is a subsidiary of BT yet the
service levels are widely different. Plusnet's service centre is in
Yorkshire rather than Mumbai and much more helpful if you can manage the
accent!

This is an outdated view. BT onshored their help desks for broadband quite
a few years ago.

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by Chris

Post by Jeff Gaines
Daniel James pointed out that Plusnet is a subsidiary of BT yet the
service levels are widely different. Plusnet's service centre is in
Yorkshire rather than Mumbai and much more helpful if you can manage the
accent!

This is an outdated view. BT onshored their help desks for broadband quite
a few years ago.

I wasn't aware of that, I wonder if my complaint about their dreadful
service brought it about?