4G home broadband router and Xbox party compatibility

[Tipsymoth]

We took delivery of a 4G router last week as an attempt to improve our woeful broadband speeds. Big mistake. I have a 16yo losing his tiny mind because he is struggling to join/stay in his Xbox party.

I can see there have been some issues with it with hot spots and I’ve tried the ideas to resolve that (namely turning off the parental controls) but is there a resolution for this with 4G routers? If not then when it is being sold there does need to be a question about whether this will be a necessary feature because really in this house it makes it pretty unfit for purpose 😔

If anyone has a fix I’d be grateful. I watched a streamed tv show the other day, I can’t do that with standard speeds here so I felt I’d joined the modern world!  (16yo has also bought himself an Xbox X series and I can’t bear the thought of that not working when it’s delivered!)

Many thanks in advance

[Chris_B]

@Tipsymoth  The game connection is only as good as the cellular connection for the router to the network.   How is that signal?  

[NetSA]

I am also 4gee home hub user and Xbox player. I can join parties etc no issues.

I did the following :

1. Disable parent controls(content controls)  on ee account number for the sim in the router .

2. Second changed the dns on the xbox wifi settings to : 

Primary 8.8.8.8 .secondary :8.8.4.4

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-change-dns-your-xbox-one-potentially-improve-speed

Finally ensure the Xbox account parent controls are off.

Give this 15 minutes for content lock to come off. (Restart router after this to sync network settings)

Doing this I can quite happy connect to Xbox live and chat with friends.

[Tipsymoth]

ChrisB - Connection seems acceptable. We have been running some speed tests as we are trying to establish if it is a good enough connection generally. We have a download speed of between 20-50 most of the time, with 2 “bars” of signal on the router.

The games etc play fine, he is happily able to play the games, much better than our fixed connection. It’s just the throwing him out of his party. (I’m understanding that is to do with allocation of IP addresses when you log on??)

Ill get him to look at the DNS settings when he gets up. If that works we will be thrilled!

[mikeliuk]

Making a note it would be very good for others to confirm on here as it points to a misconfiguration of EE's default DNS, given it's unlikely that Google DNS is misconfiguration.

Potentially this issue could be the root cause of a number of other things.

[Tipsymoth]

He has changed the DNS to the suggested settings but it hasn’t entirely worked. He is still intermittently unable to get into his party (although the hit rate seems better based on the amount of swearing I’ve heard!)

Weve made the decision to return the router. Our 14 day cooling off period is up and so we have no more time to mess around.

Our biggest issue is we need Openreach to lay about 30m of cable so we can have fibre but they refuse to do so 😔

Thanks to those that looked for us. I do think that it needs mentioning as a problem when selling the product as it really isn’t fit for purpose if the purpose is gaming.

[XRaySpeX]

What does BT Wholesale Broadband Availability Checker estimate for your phone number? Post just the whole table and the line above it, blanking out your phone number. If it doesn't recognise your phone number or you don't have one, use the Address Checker, not the Postcode Checker.

[Tipsymoth]

[Tipsymoth]

I don’t seem to be able to post the picture 😔

[XRaySpeX]

Don't worry, your images were awaiting approval. I have now done so & they should appear soon.