Plusnet fibre broadband does not cope with uploads and will disconnect you...

[#1]

There's a unique set of conditions where LCP echo requests from the remote side are not being responded to in a timely fashion by the Hub One. This is partially linked with the QoS implementation on the router, in particular that of the latest .226 firmware. It's only affecting those on our 40/2 provisioned fibre product.

The way PPP works is that if it the remote BRAS (or equivalent) doesn't receive a set amount of LCP echo replies in a pre-determined period of time, it will send a disconnection request to terminate the session. The router then responds to this request by disconnecting you from the Internet.

The problem is more prevalent on our 'new' network because the kit in use sends LCP echo requests at a higher frequency compared to that of the 'old' network.

Thanks for this explanation.

I live in the countryside and can't get fibre, but seem to be suffering the same issue on my ADSL line that has a whopping 5MB down/1MB up. I say seem to be suffering the same issue, because despite the fact Plusnet support have told me it's this issue and there's no issue with the line itself, with those speeds, as you can imagine, it's a waste of time me using cloud backup services. However, I do get frequent disconnections when downloading when the connection is completely maxed out. I guess it could be TCP control messages going back up that are saturating it, but that seems unlikely to me.

For what it's worth, I have a pretty custom setup - I don't use any Plusnet/BT hardware. I have a Draytek Vigor 120 modem bridged to a PC running the PFSense router/firewall software operating system. I also route my outbound connection through a VPN (except for certain devices like my mobile phone's IPsec connection for EE wifi calling, and a couple of Chromecasts that insist on being able to talk to Google's DNS servers). That setup has worked absolutely perfectly for three years until just before Christmas when I started seeing this disconnection issue. I think I can see the explanation above re LCP requests not being responded to reflected in my PFSense logs. PFSense also reports very high latency from the Plusnet gateway. I don't know if there's some way I can apply the temporary fix that some folk have had pushed to their routers to PFSense. I guess I'd need to know what that fix involves to do it myself.

Regardless of the setup, the whole thing is obviously really frustrating. I spoke with a support engineer on the phone who asked me if I could turn on QoS on PFSense, which I've done (to no effect), but otherwise, "we know what the issue is and we will fix it" without any indication of timescale isn't great, and also, I've really checked all the devices in the house, and nothing is doing any signficant uploading - I can trigger it by downloading a large file (though as I write this, I'm wondering if that's actually true; I certainly see the disconnection issue when downloading from Usenet using Sabnzbd, but that makes twenty or thirty connections to three different Usenet servers rather than downloading a large file using my web browser, for example. Will do some testing and report back).

Edit: this is from the PPP log on PFSense during a disconnection/reconnection, which seems to support the theory about LCP echo requests:

Feb 4 11:59:31 ppp [wan_link0] Link: Leave bundle "wan"
Feb 4 11:59:31 ppp [wan_link0] LCP: state change Opened --> Stopping
Feb 4 11:59:31 ppp [wan_link0] LCP: peer not responding to echo requests
Feb 4 11:59:31 ppp [wan_link0] LCP: no reply to 5 echo request(s)
Feb 4 11:59:21 ppp [wan_link0] LCP: no reply to 4 echo request(s)
Feb 4 11:59:11 ppp [wan_link0] LCP: no reply to 3 echo request(s)
Feb 4 11:59:01 ppp [wan_link0] LCP: no reply to 2 echo request(s)
Feb 4 11:58:51 ppp [wan_link0] LCP: no reply to 1 echo request(s)

[#2]

Hi Bob, I have tried a couple of uploads - the last about 11GB and that went through without issue, with the upload maxed out most of the time. So, your configuration change seems to work - well done. Thanks

[#3]

@purplebadger

With respect, you don't know you're born ! Here in the suburbs of NW London my ADSL speeds are 2.3 down and 0.6 up. You don't have to be in the country to receive paltry bandwidths !

I think there may be approximately 3500m of copper wire between here and the exchange and so have finally taken the plunge and should, come Tuesday 7th, have 40/2 FTTC, which is situated 300m away. I'm not holding my breath for anything spectacular but to get near to 20Mbit/s down would feel like finally arriving in the 21st century.

Anyway, due to the forthcoming 40/2 connection, I've been following this thread with interest and after the settling-in period I'll post back here any findings concerning maxing out the upload bandwidth.

The Hub One has already arrived. *Waves to Plusnet*

Regards.

[#4]

additional details:

• Make/model of router

Plusnet HubOne. 

• Firmware/software version (for Hub Ones you can get this by looking at the footer of the router admin pages)

4.7.5.1.83.8.226 updated 2/10/16

• What product/speed you have, e.g. Unlimited Fibre 40/2, Unlimited Fibre Extra 80/20 etc.

Unlimited Fibre 40/2

• Gateway you're connected to

failed to identify: 

• core2-hu0-18-0-0.colindale.ukcore.bt.net (62.172.103.16) 4.813 ms

• Device being used to upload from e.g. Android Smartphone, Windows 10 machine, Macbook OSX etc. 

• has affected variety of devices, laptops, macbooks and my desktop computer. the wireless is more relaible but my LAN connection to my desktop is currently f****d and hardly works at all. Whether this is a seperate issue i do not know

• What it is you're uploading/what service you're using e.g. iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive

problem does seem to be specific to uploading (unless there is some uploading going on I'm not aware off - am in a shared house so not impossible. It definitely drops out when using Google Drive though.

• When the problem first started

not 100% sure but at least a couple of months

• If you have access to a different router, whether or not the problem affects that too, or if it's just specific to the Hub One

I don't at present and don't want to be purchasing a new one if the problem is with plusnet's equipment, you should be replacing it.

[#5]

Dear Bob - Thank you - following your update I have reconnected the iCloud function and the internet has now been working satisfactorily for two days.

[#6]

With respect, you don't know you're born ! Here in the suburbs of NW London my ADSL speeds are 2.3 down and 0.6 up. You don't have to be in the country to receive paltry bandwidths !

I think there may be approximately 3500m of copper wire between here and the exchange and so have finally taken the plunge and should, come Tuesday 7th, have 40/2 FTTC, which is situated 300m away. I'm not holding my breath for anything spectacular but to get near to 20Mbit/s down would feel like finally arriving in the 21st century.

Wow, that's pretty bad. I used to live in central Edinburgh and had Telewest/Blueyonder/Virgin which was awesome; four years ago I was getting 50Mbit down, and I'd go back to them in a heartbeat if I could. But now I'm in rural East Lothian, with absolutely no prospect of Openreach updating the infrastructure to fibre. In fairness to Plusnet, I knew this when I moved to the countryside, so I'm not complaining about that, just this particular fault. The best chance I have at faster speeds is a local project to get the entire county essentially wifi-enabled, but it needs you to put up a mast etc, which might require planning permission, and needs line-of-sight to the closest tower. I've got a site survey scheduled.

Good luck with your new connection when it arrives.

[#7]

@bobpullen

Thanks for applying the workaround to our router. I had to wait until now to test it as each file takes about 7 hours to upload (we only have 1Mb/s) and I wasn't able to leave my laptop connected for that length of time until now. Left it running last night with my monitoring switched on and didn't notice any dropouts when I scanned the logs this morning. Looks like you've fixed it for us - but I'll keep an eye on things and post back if I notice anything untoward.

Really appreciate you going to the trouble of manually correcting our hub - very pleased it's working again now. Thanks.

[#8]

@bobpullen

I am experiencing the same problem of PPP disconnects.  This has been happening sporadically when working from home over vpn but I recently started syncing my music library up to google.  This seems to bring the connection down every 3 to 15 minutes!!!

   - Router: Plusnet Hub One | Software version 4.7.5.1.83.8.226

   - Gateway: pcn-ir01

   - Package: Fibre Unlimited 40/2

   - Traffic generating device1: Windows 10 Laptop

I've logged this with support but have received the standard scripted process of checking internal connections etc...  They are now running a 72 hour test of my line which I cynically do not expect to produce any results.

Can you add me to your list of affected customers in need of a fix?

[#9]

@bobpullen

Hi Bob, 

I am also experiencing the drop-outs described on this post with relation to uploads (icloud, youtube etc) and was directed here following discussion with the support team. 

I am using the Plusnet Hub One router, and would be grateful is you could add me to the trial of the config changes.

Many Thanks.

[#10]

Hello Bob!

Somehow I've been in contact with another user "DS" in a different page (just related with Skype issues) and I think my problem is fixed... I started to see some improvements Friday night and during Saturday I had a good Skype connection, but everything else was very slow... and yesterday everything was perfect... and today so far, the same!

I'm note sure if you did something... when you said that you were looking in a different account... perhaps it was mine? I don't know... but I wanted to say thank you very much. Apparently everything is fixed now...

If something change, I'll let you know!!! Keep up with the good work!!!

[#11]

I appear to be getting a dropout roughly every 10 minutes. I have established that the wired/wifi debate is moot as I've noticed the wired devices have simply buffered ahead sufficiently to not be affected by the <1min dropout.

[#12]

Glad I've came across this thread as this issue is very annoying and getting the answers for this issue has been somewhat frustrating

Router: Plusnet Hub One

Gateway: psb-ir01

Package: Fibre Unlimited Extra 45/9

This problem happens on my own website when trying to upload only a 200mb file and other site like youtube & soundcloud.

@bobpullen 

[#13]

So I think my problem may be related to my own equipment/setup.

As I said, I have a PFSense router that sends all my outbound traffic through a VPN. It's the VPN that drops and reconnects under heavy traffic (down or up), and - it appears - not the PPoE connection to Plusnet. PFSense triggers a VPN restart when the PPoE gateway I'm connected to doesn't respond quickly enough to its pings, so when there's high latency on my connection when I'm maxing out the connection, or for any other reason (i.e. Plusnet gateway is just slow to reply), the VPN client restarts and all the states on the router are reset, which manifests itself to me as a connection drop. I can see from the PPP logs that I've not actually reconnected since Saturday lunchtime, which is when I disabled gateway monitoring on my Plusnet WAN connection in PFSense. Unfortunately this leaves me in the situation that if the connection legitimately drops, the VPN won't reset itself as it should, and I assume, leave me without a functioning connection until I reset it manually.

That would seem to be a problem with oversensitive/changed gateway monitoring in PFSense rather than Plusnet's service though, and right enough, to my recollection, the latest upgrade to PFSense may well have been around the time I started seeing the problem - and it looks like this could be an issue with the switch from apinger to dpinger in that release. Moral of the story may well be: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I don't suppose anyone else is suffering from such a bespoke setup. Writing it down and reading the post from @bobpullen about LCP echo requests has helped me move forward (even if it now appears that's not the issue), but I'll stop polluting this thread at this point.

[#14]

Hello Bob. I've been sent here by your tech team. I am also sadly getting this problem. It's horrible and making me so upset. Most of my disconnects happen at night in waves. It's beyond frustrating. I have the hub in question. We have many devices from iOS devices uploading backups at night, sonos music speakers, Apple tv's, MacBooks, cctv cameras, Amazon alexas, and Amazon dashes. It's been happening a few months and I've spent so long on the phone to you guys. Two open reach engineer visits as well and all new equipment, filters etc. Please help with your new firmware update For me. Thank you.

[#15]

@adamyaffe, @mridings90 & @rbgwynne, I've made config changes to all of your devices which should have helped.

@toweliechaos, looking at your circuit, you are uploading heavily during certain hours of the day so I've done the same for your router too.

@Blue1 & @richCie, having difficulty locating your accounts so can you drop me a private message to let me know what your usernames are please?

@pjhitchins, I don't seem to be able to locate your Hub One. Do you have more than one? If you do, can you plug the device with the serial number ending *941 back in?