In reply to a post by Toothy_Chris:

I see things have been busy on here - sorry, I was working today....

So, when I started work this morning (I work from home) I noticed that I could not access any of my work VPN servers, in addition to the problems we were having with XBox and E-Bay.

Late this afternoon our Hey! connection dropped for a few minutes and then returned with a different external IP address. At that point everything seems to work again, apart from E-Bay. This evening (on the same IP address) even that had returned, so - touch wood - I think we are now back up and running with a full service.

Thanks again to all who got involved in the discussion.

Your IP address is an ex-US IP although that's probably some timer ago.. I think Hey probably asked the IP supplier for a new IP block. Either way it's probably fixed the issues with Geo-IP providers having more up to date records.

I wrote this up as a news item as I think it's good to raise awareness about the problem
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/9550-can-t-acces...

Really useful blog, thank you!

I had a very similar problem with Hey!Broadband also. The installation was completed and everything was fine, but a couple of days later, I received my welcome email and my external IP changed (I'm on a package with a static IP).

On that IP, any attempt to access PayPal just resulted in a blank page with "403 - Forbidden".

Contacted HB customer support and they changed my external IP (and into a new range) and it's been fine since.

Keeping an eye on packet loss however, yesterday saw 3 bursts of packet loss into the 10-15% range, each which lasted for about an hour

So, having got things sorted out, we now seem to have a new issue (or perhaps it is all related).

In the evenings our service - particular the upload speed, which affects my daughter's streaming - falls painfully low: Just 4Mbps on a 1Gb service, plus frequent full dropouts. Download remains reasonable.

Looking at Ping Plotter, the culprit appears to be the very first device/IP address after our household WiFi router. On a fibre system like Hey, will this be their switch (or whatever the equivalent is for fibre) at the local BT exchange? The IP of this device is 31.214.156.3.

Possibly related to this?

Thanks for that,

Looking at the descriptions of almost zero upload speeds, I suspect this may be the same thing. It will be interesting to see if the 'External Service Provider Maintenance' tonight will have any effect.

So far this evening, the upload speed has deteriorated a bit, but not down to the 4Mbps we saw last night.

Hey! have - no surprise - not contacted me with any update today, after I e-mailed them last night.

In reply to a post by Toothy_Chris:

Thanks for that,

Looking at the descriptions of almost zero upload speeds, I suspect this may be the same thing. It will be interesting to see if the 'External Service Provider Maintenance' tonight will have any effect.

So far this evening, the upload speed has deteriorated a bit, but not down to the 4Mbps we saw last night.

Hey! have - no surprise - not contacted me with any update today, after I e-mailed them last night.

If there's congestion you should see an increase on BQM at those times

So, after several months without an issue (Once Hey! finally got their act together), I now find I have the opposite problem - since this morning. When I try to connect to my work VPN (GlobalProtect by Palo Alto) I cannot connect. But all other sites seem fine.

Is anyone else with Hey! having similar issues with VPN access?

Thanks all.

In reply to a post by Toothy_Chris:

So, after several months without an issue (Once Hey! finally got their act together), I now find I have the opposite problem - since this morning. When I try to connect to my work VPN (GlobalProtect by Palo Alto) I cannot connect. But all other sites seem fine.
Is anyone else with Hey! having similar issues with VPN access?
Thanks all.

When you say "all other sites seem fine" - are you talking about our site or a specific site? Or you mean you can't ocnnect to the VPN from Hey?