Nighthawk R7100LG According to AAISP wont do VPN

So for many months now i acquired and paid £10 a month for a VPN of Andrews and Arnold because the only form of decent internet i can get in this rural property is EE 4G and other 4G providers.

Originally i had the small EE white 4g router which was very limited in the form of not been able to change much once inside, but the main problem with this on all my consoles was strict Nat.

Someone suggested i change this and i bought a Nighthawk R7100LG which at the time was just shy of £300.

Was told this LTE router would do everything i wanted and more, once set up and running a playstation 4 network test i noticed the Strict Nat had changed to Type 2 and i did not proceed to use the VPN i had been paying for.

But recently when playing the Nintendo Switch and Xbox i was still getting strict Nat and was also been booted out of games on the Playstation 4.

So i thought i would put in the VPN setting provided by AAISP and see if i could make things better, first of i found the whole process extremely hard to understand, after many attempts at trying to find where i put these settings provided i gave up.

In the week i rang AAISP and said can i cancel this as i have not got a clue how to get this working, at first the guy said no problem but why dont you let are technical team help you set it up.

Fine i said that will be great if thats the case, after 20 minutes of talking to the technical guy he said he could not see a way of setting this up with this router.

I said are you absolutely sure as this router cost £300 and it has VPN settings in it,he said he does not see what he needs to see and as far as he is concerned it don't work.

Im still finding this hard to believe so if anyone with any now how has information regarding this issue please tell...

Cheers.

Edited by time2die (Sat 17-Oct-20 00:49:10)

In reply to a post by time2die:

Im still finding this hard to believe so if anyone with any now how has information regarding this issue please tell...

AAISP's service is not a VPN, as it does not encrypt your information over the internet. It is called L2TP which is "Layer 2 Tunnelling Protocol" as allows you to connect to the AAISP network from somewhere else.

Think of VPN as an orange and L2TP as a kiwi fruit. They're both fruit, but otherwise they are completely different.

That your Netgear says it supports VPN doesn't help, it needs to support L2TP.

AAISP are telling you porkies - the R7100LG definitely allows you to setup a L2TP connection. You simply select 'L2TP' as connection type, and enter your AAISP supplied username and password in the corresponding fields and click 'apply'. Nearly every third party router on this planet can do L2TP so rather surprising that AAISP's 'technical' team aren't aware of this fact.

See pages 28/29/30 in the user manual under

Specify an Internet Connection That Uses a Login

http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/R7100LG/R...

In reply to a post by Highland76:

You simply select 'L2TP' as connection type, and enter your AAISP supplied username and password in the corresponding fields and click 'apply'.

Wouldn't that stop the primary LTE (4G) connection, that the OP is relying on for internet access, from working?

The point of the AAISP service is you connect to it OVER your existing (problematic) internet. The OP is relying on LTE for fast internet, but like many, the ISP uses CGNAT which is a problem for the games they want to play.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by time2die:

Im still finding this hard to believe so if anyone with any now how has information regarding this issue please tell...

AAISP's service is not a VPN, as it does not encrypt your information over the internet. It is called L2TP which is "Layer 2 Tunnelling Protocol" as allows you to connect to the AAISP network from somewhere else.

Think of VPN as an orange and L2TP as a kiwi fruit. They're both fruit, but otherwise they are completely different.

That your Netgear says it supports VPN doesn't help, it needs to support L2TP.

That's all largely academic though as AAISPs 'technical' team should have realised that the OP is trying setup their L2TP tunnel service - which he is paying good money for - even if he was referring to it as a VPN service.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by Highland76:

You simply select 'L2TP' as connection type, and enter your AAISP supplied username and password in the corresponding fields and click 'apply'.

Wouldn't that stop the primary LTE (4G) connection, that the OP is relying on for internet access, from working?

The point of the AAISP service is you connect to it OVER your existing (problematic) internet. The OP is relying on LTE for fast internet, but like many, the ISP uses CGNAT which is a problem for the games they want to play.

If the Netgear can't do 4G and L2TP at the same time, then the OP simply connects the netgear to the EE router, ie the EE kit provides the 4G service and the Netgear does the L2TP tunnelling.This is guaranteed to work 100%.

Edited by deleted (Sat 17-Oct-20 11:19:47)

In reply to a post by Highland76:

If the Netgear can't do 4G and L2TP at the same time, then the OP simply connects the netgear to the EE router, ie the EE kit provides the 4G service and the Netgear does the L2TP tunnelling.This is guaranteed to work 100%.

Agreed, a good workaround! and in fact any (non DSL) router would work, not having to buy an (expensive?) LTE router like the R7100LG

In reply to a post by Highland76:

That's all largely academic though as AAISPs 'technical' team should have realised that the OP is trying setup their L2TP tunnel service - which he is paying good money for - even if he was referring to it as a VPN service.

Depends what they were told. Support can be good but they can't be mind readers. They may not know the OP has a telco supplied device.

Thanks guys for all the response, makes interesting reading and i may well go back to AAISP technical team with the information provided by yourselves.

Would have to go back to EE with the suggestion i use there provided equipment though as this uses the Nano Sim and i changed this to a Micro sim for the netgear router.

I did use at first an adapter ,but this proved problematic and was extremely fiddly to get right, son went into a EE store and asked them for the Micro sim on the same account.

Still find the process quite hard to understand though but i thank you guys all the same for all the useful information.

Cheers all.

Was looking at this connection type [L2TP] and to be honest i can not find this in this router, i see VPN on the left hand side of the menu in advanced but nothing for connection type.

Cheers.

Edit....

I see in the mobile broadband settings ,the one that at present says [Automatic 4g or 3g] that box or drop down menu gives me the option to put LTE only in and underneath that there is options for passwords.

User name
Password
PDP type .

Cheers.

Actually it says 4GLTE only and i think I'm barking up the wrong tree here.

Edited by time2die (Sat 17-Oct-20 17:12:05)