Suddenly our internet only works when using a VPN - Why?

We have been having serious issues with our fibre internet, over the last couple of days. Our ISP (Hey! Broadband) has suggested changing the WiFi router, which they have arranged for this coming week.

Specifically, one of our WiFi bands (the 5GHz) is not working at all, while the 2.4GHz Wifi works on just a few web sites, but most do not. For those that do not work, I can usually ping them no problem, but http connections just fail.

The most curious observation, and the one I am really interested in understanding, is that the internet works fine if we enable a VPN, in the browser....

I believe we had a similar situation some time ago, but I can’t for the life of me remember what the solution was, on that occasion.

Thoughts anyone?

Switch off the 5Ghz network on the router and try that as if sharing the same ssid and password can sometimes screwup devices.

Are you able to change the DNS settings within the router ? That’s what the symptom suggests to me, change them for the free Google settings and try that

Thanks. Already set up as 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8. Nothing has been changed at our end. Neighbours on Hey fibre are not experiencing the same issues, so not the local fibre network.

is this happening to all devices or certain devices on the network ?

Fair enough, that’s me all out of ideas then.

Please come back and post when you get the fix, it may well help someone else .

Sounds like an ISP routing issue, you can reach your VPN Provider, but not other networks. A traceroute/tracert would be interesting, but otherwise this is one for the ISP to fix.

Just to be clear, are you using an HB provided router or your own?

It is happening on all devices.

We are using the standard (original) TP Link router, from Hey!

I ran the diagnostics in the router and it said it was unable to ping the default Gateway (which is set to 172.16.16.16). This is odd because web traffic which does get through is routed successfully via this IP address. But traffic which tries to go a different route (e.g. Google.com) does not get through. (I'm using Ping Plotter to observe this)

It's all very weird.

That is very weird. This is what I would be doing to troubleshoot:

Plug in a desktop/laptop via ethernet.
Can you ping well known IPs like 1.1.1.1 and others?
If you set 1.1.1.1 as your resolver in nslookup, can you resolve names against it?
If that works, can you point curl at common websites?

If none of those work at all, something is up with the routing and HB support are required.