strange mobille mifi add-ons site issue

[mdbarber]

Am asking for my friend who is very non technical but he has demonstrated the issue to me.

As we live in a rural area the best way for him to use the internet is via mifi unit which we purchased and set up and all has been working fine until he came to top up in december when it took about an hour for his attempts to get thru to the http://add-on.ee.co.uk/ site.

As stated this is being used from PC and is the only source of data, no wifi etc in the house.

All other sites and even the main account site work fine (he has a mobile thru EE as well and can get to that site no problem, just the http://add-on.ee.co.uk/ causes issues, any ideas?

tia

mdb

[XRaySpeX]

That was in Dec. Is it still slow to get to http://add-on.ee.co.uk/ ?

[mdbarber]

it appears to actually be getting worse, i was round on sat and tried for 30mins no real luck, it's like the connection drops to gsm speed on that one page...

[Jon_K]

Hi @mdbarber.

Welcome to the community.

Are you able to try connecting a phone to the device and trying to access the add-on page?

Could you also try deleting the cache and cookies on the PC?

Jon

[mdbarber]

Hi Jon, no it is a PC using a mifi and first thing i did was clear cache and cookies..

[Christopher_G]

Hi @mdbarber

Is it possible to try and use the add-on page on a different device?

Chris

[mdbarber]

I did ask him to do that as he has aanother PC running totally different OS and browser, he confirmed it also happened on that device  (i shall double check at the first opp but have no reason to suspect he did not.)

[Christopher_G]

Thanks @mdbarber

Another test could be to try the SIM card in a different EE device. It would be interesting to see what happens.

Thanks 🙂

Chris

[mdbarber]

That one is a bit trickier, neither of us has an alternative 4g unit due to the signal strength in the village we live in is quite poor.

The unit has to be at a height of about 30ft above ground before it achieves satisfactory signal/data rate (top shelf in a top floor flat)

There is no other problem apart from this one page which is not even internet based, you have to be on the mifi to use it it cannot be accessed over the internet yet all internet pages work fine and he is achieving a data rate of about 38Mb ds.

[Christopher_G]

OK, thanks @mdbarber

With the first option (trying a different device), it should be as simple as connecting a mobile phone to the hotspot and heading to the add-on page.

I've done some tests on the page here and it seems to be working OK for me.

Please let me know how you get on.

Chris

[mdbarber]

it's actually not that simple, we are not using wifi, the mifi unit is connected to the pc by either usb or rj45 it is very high on a shelf at about 9 feet up as lower down it won't get a signal, neither of us use a 4g phone and 3g seems to be a lot worse in the locale.

To use a phone is not really going to tell us much, it means using a different method of communicating with the mifi (by wifi) it also means a completely different hardware platform, OS, browser config etc etc so even if it does work (which i doubt having already used a pc using linux on the same network which also failed) it won't really narrow it down much we already know it is an intranet issue and givne the perfect performance of the platform on the internet imho it is less likely to be there, and as i said this only started in december.

It would make life easier if EE introduced a "default" PAYG method ie if there was money on the account it simply repeated the last purchse when the data ran out, then he wouldn't need to use that page at all.

At the minute this is not urgent, he has a 3 month plan with 70 days left to use his existing data but no point in leaving it to last minute.

[Katie_B]

@mdbarber thank you for providing this detail. 

I have sent you a private message to gather more information.

Thanks, Katie 🙂