External IP not pingable

[Mav359]

Just got EE 5G Broadband and have been setting it up

I cant ping the external IP and by assosiation cant RDP to my PC from an external location.

I have a DDNS updater installed on the PC which is working, Port forwarding is setup and if i ping my DNS address or even the External IP from a remote location it does resolve but im not getting a ping back and i cant establish a remote connection.

I have setup the network on the LAN port but am unsure if i should have set this up on the WAN port, little unsure of those settings though.

Would appricate some advice

[XRaySpeX]

What do you think your public IP is? The external IP seen by the router, probably starting 10. or 100. isn't your true public IP. You are finding yourself up against a limitation of EE's mobile network. The EE mobile network uses Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT) resulting in a double NAT, which games consoles often object to, which means you don't get your own public IP address but share it with other users. So you can't be uniquely id'ed on the Net & therefore your LAN cannot be addressed from outside for unsolicited accesses. This is unlike fixed BB. If this occurs there is nowt you can do to avoid it.

Your own devices & network are on the LAN of the router. Its WAN is wherever it is getting its Net connection from. Its WAN port is for pulling in an alternate source other than its SIM's mobile network.

[Mav359]

my public IP is 213.205.220.xxx

That IP is dynamic and changes if i reboot the router. My DDNS updates as a result and if i ping that IP or my DDNS from and external BT ISP range it resolves the IP it just wont respond to Ping or allow me to RDP to it.

If i can cant remote in from an external IP then this is useless to me

[Legacy0]

You would need a VPN tunnel at both ends with one end having a full WAN IP that can allow inbound traffic. With 4/5G you don't get a full WAN IP so you don't get inbound traffic only traffic outgoing that you NAT out by EE network that the matching incoming traffic is mapped back to you.

It be nice to have a full WAN IP over 4/5G but there are only so many IPv4 the only way to get a full IPv4 is by the big ISP provider.

[mav359aaa]

Its purely a software issue in terms of whether the hardware can do it, perhaps an EE network restriction but i sent the whole thing back and canceled the contract.

I tried Three mobile to see if they were any better. They have sent me THE EXACT same device only the software isnt locked down to the crayon level.

I can turn on reply to external ping, port forwarding works fine. Bridge mode is available to use (i havent yet) and all the firewall rules you would expect to have available from ANY other ISP landline or otherwise is available for me to use.

All the replies to this maybe accurate for EEs network however they are not a restriction of the technology its purely an EE issue.

I haven't had to talk with their tech support as everything is working as it should.  Again its exactly the same model Zxyel unit so not a limitation of the hardware just their software

It was also no upfront cost, £20 a month and half price for the first 6 months so MUCH better value money to boot

Super happy with it now

[ksbelec]

This thread was interesting as I am having the same problem, but not the result I wanted. At least I can stop trying to get it to work, I just paid for a subscription to a dynamic DNS company so that we could use the ee 4G router as a temporary internet fix while waiting for our wired internet connection to be set up with BT. Incoming internet traffic must, I would have thought, been a fairly common requirement for these devices.

[alex9111]

Yeah this just stung me too with my new 4G/5G router - I was remotely connecting to EC2 instances on AWS no problem if I used the form `ssh ec2-ipv4.region.compute.amazonaws.com` (i.e. using the IPv4 DNS) but if I did the "raw" IPv4 with the form `ssh ipv4`  it failed and I was super confused at first. Throw into the mix another symptom, my iPhone and MacBook connected to the new 4G/5G router just fine, but the Windows 11 desktop PC was connected but with "no internet" and I had to go into the Wifi and Ethernet adapters and enable IPv6 for them to work with it. I assume my apple devices have IPv6 enabled by default, I was surprised a modern Windows PC doesn't.

I can run this command from my MacBook when connected to the new 4G/5G router: `dig -x ipv4` which happily returns me the `ec2-ipv4.region.compute.amazonaws.com` IPv4 DNS. So yeah, not sure why this wouldn't be possible inside the router. Or can't we just use IPv6 nowadays? Or convert IPv4 to IPv6 or something?

You can see the issue really concretely by running `curl https://www.whatsmydns.net/dns/global/google-8-8-8-8.html` which works followed by `curl 8.8.8.8` which fails with `curl: (7) Failed to connect to 8.8.8.8 port 80 after 11016 ms: Couldn't connect to server`.

I also tried to run this with IPv6 to check if "raw" IPv6 "solves" this issue. I tried `curl -g -6 'https://[2001:4860:4860::8888]:80'` as `2001:4860:4860::8888` is the IPv6 of the 8.8.8.8 IPv4 address but that also fails with `curl: (28) Failed to connect to 2001:4860:4860::8888 port 80 after 75008 ms: Couldn't connect to server`