Telcom Fibre random drop-outs

Hi,
About 6 weeks ago Wefibre installed a new fibre service to my home. I also got their VOIP service installed.They gave me a Zyxel VMG8825-T50 router. Great I now have a service that runs at 600 - 800mps. However the service suffers from random drop-outs resulting in the router rebooting itself and whatever I'm doing freezing up. Anyone have any ideas what the cause could be? It's been suggested that purchasing a static iIP address at £5 a month might solve the problem?
Thanks

Are the drop outs over wireless or over Ethernet?

Ethernet and wifi - the router seems to lose the connection to the WAN

In reply to a post by Allan1:

Ethernet and wifi - the router seems to lose the connection to the WAN

If the router is crashing perhaps ask the ISP to replace?

either do what @jchamier suggested or if you have a spare router with wan port - try that for a few days.. Or invest in a decent wifi router that can handle 1gb +

Maybe try a different cable known to be good for 1Gbps between the router and the ONT.

A couple of good suggestions already. Make sure you raise a fault with the supplier too. It might a poor splice somewhere.

Hi,
Thanks for all the helpful replies. Apparently the drop-outs in service are also being experienced by others in the same village. Replacement routers have been tried with no effect. Cables to my devices are Cat 6 so no problem there. One explanation being given is that it's due to Wefibre being a small company and having a small supply of shared ip addresses. Is this likely? Lot's of ISPs seem to have been routinely providing shared ips for years without everyone reporting drop-outs?

In reply to a post by Allan1:

Hi,
Thanks for all the helpful replies. Apparently the drop-outs in service are also being experienced by others in the same village. Replacement routers have been tried with no effect. Cables to my devices are Cat 6 so no problem there. One explanation being given is that it's due to Wefibre being a small company and having a small supply of shared ip addresses. Is this likely? Lot's of ISPs seem to have been routinely providing shared ips for years without everyone reporting drop-outs?

But why is the router crashing? it can't be due to the service dropping out, can it?

Edited by PCJM40 (Thu 07-Sep-23 13:29:42)

I'm with WeFibre in Northumberland and found it to be almost unusable when it was first installed. Within 24 hours though, I got their support team to assign me a static IPv4 address for an extra £5 a month and since then it's been absolutely fine. I was given a Zyzel VMG8825-T50 router which is fine, not amazing but does the job.

I generally get around 400-700Mbps over ethernet, but I've not been able to manage more than this on the download side yet - I suspect due to capacity constraints. Uploads generally seem pretty solid at 900-940Mbps though.

I've heard a few people locally having similar issues that you describe and being given the same answer regarding IP addresses. Given the problems I was having when I first signed up, I'm assuming they have some problems with their CGNAT implementation and having a static IP seems to avoid these. That's purely speculative on my part though.

Hi,
Speedwise for me is similar to what you describe. I did try to order a static ip on their website but that has been pending for several months and I haven't bothered to pursue it as they've sent me two new routers - which they don't seem to want back(I've asked). My line has been drop out free for the last two weeks. The support guy says that Telecom have replaced something on their network, doesn't say what.I've yet to encounter anyone who actually gets a speed of 1 gig which their website implies to be achievable by 50% of their users
Cheers
Al

In reply to a post by Allan1:

Hi,
Speedwise for me is similar to what you describe. I did try to order a static ip on their website but that has been pending for several months and I haven't bothered to pursue it as they've sent me two new routers - which they don't seem to want back(I've asked). My line has been drop out free for the last two weeks. The support guy says that Telecom have replaced something on their network, doesn't say what.I've yet to encounter anyone who actually gets a speed of 1 gig which their website implies to be achievable by 50% of their users
Cheers
Al

Based on the discussion I had with the installer, he suggested that there was a gigabit backhaul link to the cabinet serving the village. If this is true, then it's effectively impossible to ever achieve the headline speeds since you'll only ever get the advertised 1Gbps minus whatever anyone else in the village is actively using (plus the usual ethernet overheads etc).

I don't know if that's totally accurate, although when I questioned it with their support team, they argued:

...to be able to offer you a gigabit fibre connection for just £20 a month, our backhaul costs need to match...

Which to me suggests there might be some truth to that. Although I would argue if you're sharing 1Gbps backhaul when you have ~100 customers connected it, then you shouldn't really be selling a 1Gbps service. They also tried to argue that it was just a peak time thing, although the fact I only get 600-700Mbps at 02:00 in the morning makes me think otherwise. That said, I wouldn't have thought that there was that much idle usage on the network at those sorts of times.

I'm getting around 450Mbps over 20 theads (using the attributes -R -P 20) at this point in the evening to a private iperf3 server I'm hosting in Azure (capable of ~10Gbps in theory). The single thread performance on iperf3 is around 150Mbps though, not sure if that's normal? A single-threaded Speedtest shows a similar result: https://www.speedtest.net/result/15355255118

Nexfibre are currently rolling out their 10G XGS network in my area, so the optimistic side of me hopes that a decent ISP joins VM as a reseller and I can jump onto that in the future instead.

WeFibre has been good, but I can't say my experience has been anything more than good really, but I guess that's what £20 a month gets you.

My experience with wefibre gives me the impression that they're a rather shambolic organisation. I'm retired so no longer really require the speed of connection that I did when I was employed but I do like reliability. The £20 was only a 12 month introductory price so it is to be hoped that there will be more alternatives available by the time the cost goes up