Unable to Connect to Wikipedia via Plusnet Broadband

[#1]

Glad to see I'm not alone in experiencing this frustrating problem. Though I've experienced it for some time occasionally, just got much worse in recent days

As noted above, it's not DNS, changing DNS makes no difference.

Equally rubbish on IOS or Windows devices, with assorted browsers.

It works fine via my 4G (Giffgaff = O2) either directly on my phone or using my phone as a hotspot for a PC.

Come on PlusNet/BT get it sorted please.

[#2]

I've received this reply from Plusnet: (edited down)

Our Support Team have updated your Question (reference number: 239166649) with the comment shown below.

..thank you for getting in touch. It has been brought to light that there may be an issue when trying to reach Wikipedia.  This is currently being investigated and will hopefully be resolved sooner rather than later. Please accept out sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may be causing. Kind regards, Nicole Goddard

[#3]

That's encouraging to hear, thanks for the update @WBJBlake.

[#4]

Following a tip-off from someone on the BT Community forums, I have factory reset my router, and this seems to have resolved the Wikipedia issue for me on all of my affected devices.

Either that, or a very lucky co-incidence!

[#5]

May be a coincidence- looks like it’s working fine here now too, no router reset (or even reboot) - just as quick as it used to be. Makes you realise just how much you casually look up stuff on Wikipedia, even if it is just “which film has that bloke also been in”!

[#6]

Same here, seems to be fixed at present, working fine at last, hopefully that will continue.

It will be interesting to hear what the problem was though....

[#7]

Seems to be fixed here too, so I suspect the router reset was a coincidence.

There's still something weird with the second to last hop compared to Starlink or Plusnet via a VPN, but at least it's working now:

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|                                      WinMTR statistics                                   |
|                       Host              -   %  | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
|                       251.core.plus.net -    0 |  100 |  100 |   12 |   13 |   35 |   13 |
|                            84.93.253.95 -    0 |  100 |  100 |   12 |   13 |   14 |   13 |
|                          195.99.125.144 -    0 |  100 |  100 |   12 |   13 |   14 |   13 |
|      peer2-et0-1-4.slough.ukcore.bt.net -    0 |  100 |  100 |   13 |   17 |   67 |   14 |
|                      Request timed out. -  100 |   21 |    0 |    0 |    0 |    0 |    0 |
|                   r2ams2.core.init7.net -    0 |  100 |  100 |   20 |   21 |   52 |   20 |
|                   r1ams2.core.init7.net -    0 |  100 |  100 |   19 |   21 |   41 |   20 |
|                  gw-wikimedia.init7.net -    0 |  100 |  100 |   19 |   20 |   39 |   20 |
| et-0-0-50.asw1-by27-esams.wikimedia.org -   18 |   57 |   47 |   20 |  313 | 4419 | 4419 |
|           upload-lb.esams.wikimedia.org -    0 |  100 |  100 |   19 |   19 |   20 |   20 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|

[#8]

@crgbt 

"so I suspect the router reset was a coincidence."

Quite possibly, but some co-incidence!

I checked Wikipedia just before doing the hub factory reset and it wasn't working for me. A couple of minutes later and it's fine.

It has been suggested on the BT thread that all that happened was picking up a new public IP address which resolved it. However, I power cycled the hub a couple of days ago to get a new IP address and all three, the original IP, after the power cycle and after the factory reset were all within the same range - ie the first three octects were the same, with only the last three digits changing.

[#9]

Seems to be fixed here as well, thank god! 😎

No action was required at my end.

Now, back to my usual Wikipedia obsession haha.

[#10]

I received a reply to my Plusnet ticket (yesterday) saying this issue has been fixed.   It certainly is now working for me both from a PC and an android phone.  Response time from wikipedia is sub-second. (Virtually instant).

[#11]

My tracert now looks like this:

Tracing route to dyna.wikimedia.org [185.15.59.224] over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 3 ms 2 ms 1 ms PNHUB1 [192.168.1.254]
2 10 ms 8 ms 9 ms 254.core.plus.net [195.166.130.254]
3 10 ms 9 ms 9 ms 84.93.253.119
4 11 ms 12 ms 10 ms 195.99.125.138
5 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms peer8-et-0-1-2.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net [109.159.252.178]
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 33 ms 69 ms 55 ms r2ams2.core.init7.net [5.180.135.240]
9 15 ms 16 ms 33 ms r1ams2.core.init7.net [5.180.135.234]
10 16 ms 15 ms 15 ms gw-wikimedia.init7.net [77.109.134.114]
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 32 ms 15 ms 15 ms text-lb.esams.wikimedia.org [185.15.59.224]