Netgear Nighthawk 5G hub issues

[palmerdavid]

Dear XraySpex,

Hi! you seem to have a deep understanding and experience of this tech that I hope you will be willing to share to help with a problem that is leaving me scratching my head!!

I bought a Netgear Nighthawk 5G MR5200 mobile broadband hub from eBay. It was sold "new" but it turns out it wasn't and Netgear say it isn't covered for help or warranty.

It worked fine for a few days but now has a permanent "MobileBroadband Disconnected - your data connection is disconnected" message.

I have tried all the correct APN settings and factory reset without change. In another post you mentioned that the MCC and MNC were wrong with a mobile hub acting like this and sure enough, my unit seems stuck on MNC 20 and keeps defaulting to "3 UK" for the carrier.

Please, could you tell me how these can be edited as there does not seem to be an option to change these values within the Netgear UI, either APP or browser...

MANY thanks if you can help!

David

[palmerdavid]

I’ll do that now...

[EssexBoyEE]

Worst case scenario you don't need user and password but you do need correct APN name and authentication type to be correct.

Also on the routers dashboard / Admin Page there is a connect to cellular tick box within settings, this needs to be ticked and then the router rebooted.

[mikeliuk]

Hi @palmerdavid ,

As you've mentioned a number of times that you see "3 UK", I would recommend that you visit the router management page in a browser and Settings -> Advanced Settings -> Cellular and check that "Network mode" is set to Auto (p.56 of the MR5100/MR5200 manual). I would have expected a factory reset to have taken this back to Auto already, hence a double check.

Regardless of how you do it, you will need to get the Network to show as "EE" (manual selection may be required if it won't pick up automatically and with a few reboots). At that point it's likely you should be able to send and receive text messages so it's worth checking that. If you are unable to connect to EE's cellular network, the below is also likely to be unsuccessful.

The below are known-good for the MR1100:

APN Name: EE

APN: everywhere

PDP: IPV4

PDP Roaming: IPV4

Authentication: None

Don't confuse the "APN Name" with "APN" above. The "APN Name" is arbitrary, and the "APN" must be exact. Authentication none implies username and password are irrelevant and they are empty in the MR1100 (and it seems disabled in the corresponding situation for the MR5200).

If the MR5200 is anything like the MR1100, I highly recommend doing all initial configurations using the router management page in a browser as a bar will appear at the bottom to allow you to apply or discard changes. Once things are working, you can go back to the app.

Make sure you set the EE APN to Active and apply the change. You can delete the APN configuration for any network provider which you do not have a SIM for. At this point I would recommend to reboot the MR5200 using the interface in the browser.

Once the router comes back up, check it is on the EE network. If it is not, you may as well give up there. If you are on the EE network, you can take a look at the status page to see what IP address you have been assigned on the network provider's network. You can also check the Diagnostics tab to check you are properly connected. Good luck! 🤓

If you've reached here and it's still not working, it may be useful to advise the firmware version, full model name as shown in the battery compartment, and whether you know the router was originally sold in the USA, or in Europe.