Came to the forums to check if anyone was seeing latency today (it's been getting worse for a couple of weeks), but found this thread & details of CGNAT, which I wasn't aware HB were using & didn't think to check.

I'm certain I was not on CGNAT before (have been with Hey since May22) but have been having issues with port forwarding recently. Have been banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why my port forwards weren't working, it turns out I am on CGNAT... Public IP is 87.254.x.x, router WAN is 100.64.x.x. I'm on bridge mode with my own firewall/router.

Guess I'll need to email them to get a static IP.

What kind of latency are you seeing/what time of day?

Mine has never been quite right (Evening congestion style) - they're FINALLY looking into fixing it in "Early November" apparently.

Wondering if it's a similar situation for you.

If you just ask for a public IP, they should oblige without the extra cost of a static IP.

I’m having peak time evening throughput issues at the moment. Speeds are down to 200Mb. It’s been acknowledged and there is a new line card waiting to be installed I’m told. Latency is all good though.

Exactly the same thing they said to me @nofappingway,

From my last email with them:


"Apologies for the late answer.



The issues in the evening regarding the connectivity should be solved by the end of the month or during the first weeks of November. A New Card will be installed on the OLT.



Now I can’t give you a precise date , but as soon I have an update, I will pass it on to you."

There were some pretty major issues around May this year with evening latency & packet loss but it's been pretty flawless for me since then, until around mid-October. It's been nowhere near as bad as earlier in the year, but we're getting sporadic high ping times in games, and periods of packet loss.

It generally only lasts a few minutes at a time as far as I've noticed, but it has been getting more frequent the past few days or week. Time-wise usually around the evening peak 6pm-11pm. I don't often do speed tests unless I notice an issue, but earlier this evening it went down to around 500/200 for a while. It's back to normal now. Usually I get a very solid 930/930+, which it is right now.

@nofappingway, I'll ask about the public address first, rather than static.Thanks for the suggestion.

Thought I'd add a post in case this helps someone sometime...

I've had Hey Broadband for about a month, in West London, Ealing.
900/900; Own router (pfSense) & Static IP address.

Install was fine and speeds are great (some work for me to improve the home network & router HW)

But I started to notice connection losses occasionally (ie dropped conference calls).
Traced it back to DHCP issues on the WAN interface to the Hey Broadband ONT.

PFSense was trying to renew the 10-minute (!!) lease, as expected at 50% ie 5 mins, and was sending DHCPREQUEST to 'renew' the current IP - and would get no reply. All the requests were UNICAST to the IP address of the server that had answered the previous renewal (in my case, always .3 in my subnet). No answer. Eventually Pfsense would send the request BROADCAST instead (not sure what triggered this... not always the same Nth request). The broadcast request would get an immediate successful response.

But if PfSense didn't change from UNICAST to BROADCAST requests soon enough, the lease would expire, at which point PfSense would mark it at down, and remove all the routes (including default / 0.0.0.0) from the route table (so now, no internet). It would then immediately do a (BROADCAST) DHCPDISCOVER, which would get a response, and then the internet connection would be back again. Always under 20 seconds or so, but long enough for a noticable connection drop.

Some google searching found others (in other countries) with similar issue. Conclusion seems to be that HeyB (and others) set their DHCP servers to ignore unicast DHCPREQUEST and PfSense (perhaps other FreeBSD) was persisting with unicast DHCPREQUEST (or persisting too long??). An "incompatible" combination.

However, as of Pfsense 2,7 it's possible to put
'supersede dhcp-server-identifier 255.255.255.255'
in the WAN Interface's / Lease Requirements and Requests / Option modifiers
to force the dhcprequests to go broadcast not unicast.

In my case I can see the renewal now getting a success at the first attempt... so seems a successful fix so far

Thanks for sharing, that’s good to know. HB still use PPP in my town but I do plan to switch OPNsense sometime soon which I can only assume shares the same behaviour out of the box.

What hardware are you running pfSense on?

I'm also running pfSense, though my installation is very borked at the moment. The machine it was on died & I had to replace it in a hurry. Fortunately my daughter is an SRE for a domain hosting company & was able to "massage" the system to get it working on a new box I bought from Currys... I haven't had the time to rebuild it properly. I have 2 connections set up as failovers & to be quite honest I can't remember how I did it

I've not had any of the disconnection issues you mention here, though it wouldn't hurt to check the DHCP logs to see if mine is doing the same thing. Where do you see the logs for the WAN DHCP requests?

@nofappingway, mine is running on a very low spec PC:

Intel(R) Celeron(R) N4505 @ 2.00GHz
2 CPUs: 1 package(s) x 2 core(s)

It was the cheapest Acer Aspire I could find in stock at Currys the same day, that had space for the dual NIC I needed to put in it... I need 3 network ports for 2 incoming & one local. I had to get it up asap as I work from home. That is the downside of having the incoming fiber on bridge mode & using your own router/firewall to connect to PPPoE. It's been rock solid though. Aside from the slightly hacky pfsense reinstall by moving the SSD to a completely different machine, the hardware itself has been great.

Previous Openreach based fibre connections have always been via DHCP for me.

HeyB started in Feb'23 with PPPoE with no VLAN ID.
As part of buying, agreed not use CGNAT, get a variable IP.

Then around Apr'23 it moved to PPPoE with VLAN ID 20, which is where it still is Nov'23
This changed put me back on CGNAT and I had to ask to be taken off again.

This was around the same time the upload speed increased for free 400down/200up to 400down/400up.
Happy days.


In 9 months there have been a couple of 30-60mins of downtime at 2am which were planned maintenance (received warning emails).
Have had one, one hour outage and one two hour outtage during the day. Both unplanned but near the start (around March/April).

Had one 4 day outtage because some other supplier decided to yank my cable out while working on another property (nice bit of job creation). Not Hey'B fault. Notified Monday and engineer fixed it Friday.


So on the whole HeyB have been excellent so far. Perhaps not 100% slick + well drilled. But they have been responsive to customer issues and communicated things up front.
FAR easier / quicker to speak to compared to BT / TalkTalk also.

And crucially the actual connection has been solid + consistently 10% faster than advertised.

In reply to a post by pigeon35:

Hello,

I found this thread a few weeks ago while searching the internet for information about possibly using Hey Broadband and my own router.

While much of what I type has already been said, I figured I'd add this one more post to the list to confirm how its panned out so far (rather than start another thread).

Location: Surrey, Feb 2023.

I'm using my own router (a 7w x86 OpenWRT box) and host a family email server, so it has meagre usage but was a deal breaker in terms of it has to be routeable from the outside world.
Occasionally I have cause to VPN in from outside also.
Previous 2 years with TalkTalk fibre 80Mbps/20Mbps. OpenWRT router connected to Nokia G-010G-Q GPON ONT via ethernet. WAN IP via DHCP.
I pay £8 a year for DDNS, no fixed IP.

BT customer for 12 years, TalkTalk for last 2 years. Reasons for swapping supplier are mostly financial.
Both companies previously competed / discounted when pressured each time contracts came up for renewal. But not this year. TalkTalk were 33% higher than HeyB and BT 50% higher.

I rang HeyB to ask questions and confirm what was on their website (as it differed to info found on some internet posts). Got through to them in less than 90 seconds, they were very helpful.
There were definite gaps in their prepared responses and understanding of their own setup (no doubt this is largely due to they are keeping costs down by focusing on the 80% vanilla installs).
There also seemed a separation between departments and their CRM system. As I received calls / emails about things already resolved. However that's a VAST improvement on not getting called back at all (BT).
Overall, helpful and positive experience, I hope they do well.

As a general moan, it seems a waste that companies cannot "take over" the unused fibre line into the house. As a new provider, they needed to drill another line into the house.
This is not a criticism of HeyB, but the industry setup as a whole. Every 2 years we're to have new cables and holes in the wall just to change supplier? Apparently so.
I admit I didn't research what I can / could not do in terms of removing the old cable beyond it was not my kit. Not to mention the 2 week overlap with service start/end meant I had a fallback plan in case things did not go well.

HeyB provided either:
1. Adtran 814-v6 WiFi Router capable of taking VOIP phone (RJ11 socket). Another of their websites refers to a TP Link Archer XR500v, unsure if this is just out of date info, or location specific.
or
2. "Configure our router to act as a bridge" . They actually provided an Adtran SDX 611 GPON ONT. This meant no VOIP (unless your own kit can), but did mean a much smaller box (than switching a whole router to bridge mode) that uses barely 2w and basically mirrored the TalkTalk setup.
Option 2 is exactly what I was after.

I asked if they operated CGNAT or if my public IP would be routable. The answer was, it was CGNAT, but this could be removed and I could get the engineer to ring through the change on the day, it was a "2 second job".
Given I was using my own kit, it seemed sensible to start off as vanilla as possible, confirm CGNAT was operating and ring through after the connection was working, rather than try and set it up before the install and have potentially adding another variable to the mix.
Install day and the engineer rang in advance, completed the installation efficiently.
The PPPoE connection worked first time and sure enough the routers WAN port IP was 100.64.n.n. So rang in that "2 second" request (5min to get through this time) and it wasn't quite so straightforward. It took a little re-explaining to get across the issue and then took 4 days to fix.
However during that time they called me to update they were still working on it and ultimately they did resolve it fairly promptly overall. Plus the resolution came on a Sunday which is some indication as to their efforts.

It's only been 10 days, but so far so very good. I pay for 400Mbps/200Mbps and with SQM turned off I get between 402/214 and 442/233, with 4-5ms pings. Which is great! And for the same price as 80/20 with TT, fixed for 2 years.
Customer service may not have been a well oiled / polished affair, but they were helpful, rang back and resolved something quickly.

The 2 elephants in the room are quality of service over time (how bullet proof / reliable will the connection be).
And what will the company do re: pricing going forward. Their advert clearly said "No price increase during the length of your contract".
The T's and C's pricing guide says "No price increase during minimum commitment period", mine being 24 months.
However, section 25 of their T's and C's says "At any time, we may change our services, our charges, our equipment, our apparatus or the terms of Our Agreement"
"This may happen" followed by bunch of cost pressure related reasons and finally "for any other reason that we can’t predict now".
Great.
TalkTalk tried this; advertising / selling a "fixed price" deal and then 6 months into it, putting up the price 10%. Ultimately they relented eventually, but it left a bad taste and of course I told anyone I'd ever met about it.
They say there is no such thing as bad publicity, nonsense, try putting prices up mid contract!

So is HeyB too good to be true. Are they just hooking people at lower price points to then increase prices during the contract term. Obviously I hope not!
I'm hoping they are people of their word and are able to provide the service they claim at the price they claim for as long as the contract.
If they do that, and are competitive again in two years, I would of course stay (all things being equal). Not to mention, if I hop again, the house will start to resemble swiss cheese.

Apologies for the waffle. Really was supposed to just cover the setup + kit + process.

Hope its of use to someone else.

Apologies for resurrecting such an old thread, but I have a question: When you said they can remove the CGNAT, will they give you a normal dynamic IPv4 address or would it be a static IPv4 address or do you have the flexibility to choose?