Weird connection problem with Plusnet

spudbynight

spudbynight

spudbynight

Soldato
Joined
8 Nov 2006
Posts
7,535
Location
Ireland/Northern Ireland Border
I have an intermittent (but frequent) connectivity issues with plusnet.

I have a FTTC connection which connects at 72Mbps. Normally it is fine, however recently I have been having issues where real use connectivity drops under 1Mbps and as low as 0.1Mbps. Pings jump as high as 700odd.

Plus net ran some diagnostics and said they couldn't find a problem. They sent me out a replacement router. I plugged that in and connected to it (over ethernet) and the problem persisted. I spoke to plus net and they couldn't see what the problem was and have escalated this to their second tier support.

I tried to access the control panel for the new router to setup my local wireless. Imagine my surprise to see the front page for a BT Home Hub 5 rather than the local Thomson router I have. Imagine my further surprise to see several IPs listed that don't belong to anything on my network!

When I tried to login to the settings page my password wouldn't work. If I hit refresh the ip address (192.168.1.254) seems to switch between resolving to a Thomson router and this BT Home Hub 5. The chaps at plus net seemed to think this was a red herring when I called them back. I mused that maybe there was some sort of MAC address conflict with the BT Openreach modem the router was attached to. They didn't think this was the case.

Any thoughts from anyone?
 
I do have power line adaptors and that seems to have been the problem. They were setup with their own encryption keys when first installed.

I have reset both to factory settings and reconnected and everything SEEMS to be OK at the moment.
 
Make sure you set your own keys.

The same default keys are used by all adapters out of the box. If both you and your neighbour don't bother changing them then you can end up with a shared network.
 
The power line adaptors I have are from Solwise. They have which what call a "private network name" which I think means the network key. This is how they describe it :

"To create a HomePlug Mediaxtream Network, you need at least two HomePlug Mediaxtream devices, which is using random Private Network Names. When you press Simple Connect Button on both devices, a common Private Network Name will be automatically generated to enable them to communicate with each other."

I reset both homeplugs to their default "private network name" and then ran the simple connect to generate a common private network name between them. It seems to have done the trick so far.
 
It's likely the issue with you connecting to a home hub instead of the plusnet router was because a neighbour has the same type of homeplug and your homeplugs (or just one of them) have somehow been intermittently connecting to the neighbours homeplugs (see if you can find a BT homehub on wireless, and if you can find one close enough then that might be the reason).

The reset you did would have fixed that issue, but there is a chance that it could reoccur so you might have to get a new set of homeplugs from another manufacturer (this might not even work, but it might be a more permanent fix to the issue).

Have you been having the issue with speed after you reset the homeplugs?
 
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