topic Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working in Broadband & Landline

Standard Port Forwarding not working

Bondy86 — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:12:41 GMT

EE Full Gig broadband using a EE Smart Hub Wifi 7 router
Followed the User Guide and a YouTube video but CANNOT get port forwarding to work.

https://youtu.be/LJ3X3dD3DFU?t=648

I can 100% access those devices via my LAN on those ports and they work 100%
Cannot access them via my WAN IP address on those ports.
PortChecker shows the ports are closed.

However when I put the server into a DMZ (DO NOT RECOMMEND) I can then access the ports from my WAN which must mean the Router/Firewall is not working correctly.

Please can someone recommend a fix for me.
Kind regards,

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

Bondy86 — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:41:00 GMT

As I only had this installed today I was able to reconnect back to my old Vodafone broadband that is still up but not sure how long for.

And as you can see below, VERY SIMPLE port mapping and my Jellyfin server works 100% from my WAN IP

BTW its only TCP that needs to be open so ignore the TCP/UDP

Why doesn't it work for the EE Router with the same configuration of port forwarding.

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

bobpullen — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 15:02:44 GMT

Is it the 7 Plus or the 7 Pro hub you have?

Not exactly the same but I am hosting both Home Assistant and a Plex media server on my LAN without any port forwarding issues (currently using a 7 Pro) 🤔

Presumably your servers are on the same local IP they were when connected to the Voda hub? What machines are they? Windows or something else? If Windows, have you ensured that the network connection hasn't reverted to 'public'?

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

Bondy86 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:29:19 GMT

Its a 7 Plus, spoke to support they are apparently going to push out a firmware update that should take place by midnight.

Home Assistant OS is running on bare metal, not sure if Linux has similar Public/Private/Domain firewall zones.
Same LAN IP, same ports as before.
The very second I put the server into the DMZ it starts working BUT opens up SMB, NetBIOS and a host of other ports to the internet... which is very bad.

I'll see what happens tonight and if they upgrade the firmware.

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

tnj — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 17:56:38 GMT

With Home Assistant you will be using insecure http:// Port 8123 on your LAN but I assume you will be using something similar to NGINX Home Assistant SSL proxy and a Dynamic DNS (DynDNS or DDNS) service with Let's Encrypt support so the remote access is https:// and if you are it will be Port 443 that you want to open.

The SSL on Home Assistant takes a bit of setting up or alternatively you can use the Home Assistant NabuCasa Cloud where you do not have to open up any ports but that is chargeable.

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

Bondy86 — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 08:48:47 GMT

No change of firmware, even after a reboot this morning.
Will be calling support and if they cannot fix it, cancelling the broadband.

However just noticed another bug.

When editing the External Ports it now shows as RED

Then clicking on SAVE returns this error

Going back and deleting the END External Port or trying to change it to 0 causes it to update to 1 and CANNOT be saved.

Actually trying to put in anything after it turns RED does not allow it to be saved.

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

bobpullen — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:10:26 GMT

The images haven't cleared yet so I can't see them. Have you tried outright deleting and recreating them? I have a 7 Plus here that I could try with but won't be in a position to do so until tomorrow.

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

Bondy86 — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 11:50:59 GMT

The issue has been resolved by Factory Resetting the router.

However the GUI issues still persist and are being looked into by a lovely BT engineer.

SOLUTION: Factory Reset using the recessed reset button (use a pin) on the back of the router.

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

Pecbeck — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 14:27:22 GMT

Brand new 7 plus moved from bt . Have been happily using nginx proxy manager on my old bt hub forwarding por5s 80 and 443. I cannot get it to work on hub 7 plus however. After reboots, usually show both ports open but letsencrypt fails to renew certificates (uses port 80) . Port 443 seems to work as I can get http only from the Internet, but there's clearly an issue with port 80 forwarding.

Are you saying factory reset fixes, or is that only for duplicate red border issue?

I can't believe something so basic doesn't work

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

Pecbeck — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:07:15 GMT

Factory reset didn't fix. 2 hours on support chat, now they are sending an engineer! Quite how he will fix a software bug is beyond me. It looks like this only affects hub 7 plus, because some users here say forwarding is fine on 7 pro. I asked ee support to send me a 7 pro, but they insisted on an engineer, appearing to imply I don't know what I am doing. Had my home docker apps happily running using nginx reverse proxy for years on my old bt hub.

So pleased I moved to Ee hub 😒

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

bobpullen — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 20:00:00 GMT

@Pecbeck - exactly how have you got things configured?

I have port 80 and 443 successfully forwarded on a 7 Plus, pointing to a Caddy reverse proxy server that's doing SSL/renewing certs via Cloudflare. All working fine and dandy. Not quite the same but an indicator that it can't be entirely broken 🤔

How are you renewing the certs? If you put a file on your server where the renewal http challenge is looking, can you get to it from outside your network?

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

Pecbeck — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 22:28:41 GMT

Same, 80 and 443 forwarded to static ip on raspberrypi. Had lots of ch errors configuring, after several tries reboots factory reset got port configured. Tried nginx (was working fine on previous bt hub) and also tried caddy. Both had problems renewing certs. Logs tend to indicate it can send out of 80, but letsencrypt can't talk back through 80. 443 sometimes works for http only, but flaky.

I guess I'm not on cgnat, so have to assume port 80 incoming is issue

How did you get it working? I've been on this all week since Monday when I got the 7 plus

They insisted on sending an engineer after 2 hours on support call, coming tomorrow

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

Pecbeck — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 22:32:53 GMT

BTW port checker yougetsignal says ports open. This is all very bizarre. I've tried trashing npm and reinstalling, constantly fails to get certs, same on caddy

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

Pecbeck — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 10:31:33 GMT

Something changed overnight. Yesterday I saw dns timeout problems and certificate wouldn't renew. Woke up today and all,is working!

I changed nothing

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

bobpullen — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 13:02:25 GMT

@Pecbeck wrote:
How did you get it working? I've been on this all week since Monday when I got the 7 plus

I didn't do anything, just configured the port forwarding rules and pointed them to my server. Similar to you, I came from a different hub where it was already set up and working. My static LAN IP is configured directly on the server and not assigned via the hub if that makes a difference 🤷

Odd that it's just sprung back into life. I know there's a firmware upgrade doing the rounds so wonder if you were upgraded overnight?

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

Joycee501 — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 13:22:33 GMT

I was upgraded overnight and can now assign Static IP's, but for the life of me, non of my Port Forwarding Rules are working. Going to take a break and come back to it in a few hours with a fresh head; otherwise it'll all get thrown out the window.

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

Pecbeck — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 14:17:15 GMT

Yesterday I had dns timeouts and still couldn't renew ssl certificates. I have a feeling it may have upgraded f/w overnight to 4001, if not maybe dns propagation

I'll never know, just glad it suddenly started working

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

Joycee501 — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 15:52:18 GMT

Been at this for hours and hour and just can't get port forwarding to work. It feels like EE are intercepting both 80 and 443 as after opening both ports; setting up NGINX to handle the reverse proxy and using cloudflare to deal with DDNS; it just doesn't work.

curl -v http://<my public ip address> - Connection timed out

curl -v https://<my public ip address> - Connection timed out

Does anyone have any advice as I'm losing my mind here. I've never experienced anything like this in all my years of setting up networks.

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

Pecbeck — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 17:14:25 GMT

I had similar problems . Was using duckdns and dynu . Even th9ugh ports 80 and 443 showed open, I could not get letsencrypt to create certificates. Suddenly on Friday it started working, I think the was a hub firmware update Thursday night. I'm now on f/w 4001 and everything works fine now. I moved to dynu from duckdns as duckdns is flaky. I don't use the ddns on the hub, just have a program on my raspberrypi to update ip

Hope that helps, I was also tearing my hair out all week since I moved from BT hub to EE. BT hub was working fine on NPM (nginx gui, brilliant app), but failed with EE hub until friday

Re: Standard Port Forwarding not working

Joycee501 — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 17:28:28 GMT

I'll give dynu a try. Like you, I moved from duckdns to Cloudflare because the reliability of duckdns wasn't good enough for me... Also on 4001 since Thursday, so hopefully can get this resolved.