Stadia, mobile data, and checking your connection

[smxldn]

Hi all,

Re: Issue with Stadia using mobile data.

I recently got Google's Stadia game service and have it working on wifi on my phone, a Google Pixel 3a. My issue is that when I try to use EE's mobile data (on 4g and getting an average 60mbps), Stadia ends up stuck with the message "Checking your connection". I spoke to Google and really cannot see the issue being on their end (after all, Stadia works great across various devices on wifi): it only has an issue when trying to play via 4g on EE.

Stadia's traffic goes via TCP/UDP: 44700-44899. It sort of seems like EE is not opening these ports when Stadia is requesting to access them in order to allow the Stadia gaming service to run and hence why I end up getting stuck with the "Checking your connection" message. Having said that (which is just an assumption on my part), I do know others who have successfully used the Stadia service on EE's 4g mobile data, so I know that it is possible and that EE does allow the service to operate.

Is there some sort of setting that EE needs to switch on for the service to operate? I'm on the monthly SIM Plan 50GB and the service to date has been great. I would really like to resolve this issue I'm having with Stadia but at the moment I'm struggling to get it resolved.

Help!

Thanks,

James

[Jon_K]

Hi @smxldn.

Welcome to the community.

If your mobile data is working fine for other applications, we would need to get this investigated further.

I'd recommend getting in touch with our Tech Gurus so they can investigate further and help you come to a resolution.

Jon

[smxldn]

Hi @Jon_K ,

Thanks for the prompt reply. I got in contact with the Tech Guys and spoke to Jermaine in Tech Care. He advised that I come back to this post and request a member of the offline team to contact me (as they deal specifically with gaming).

Can you please progress this Jon?

Thanks,

James

[Jon_K]

Hi @smxldn.

We don't have a specific gaming department.

I'll send you a private message on here.

Please take a look and get back to me.

Jon

[smxldn]

Hi @Jon_K,

I managed to speak to the offline team yesterday. They put me through to the tech team but they were unable to resolve the issue and suggested I update my community post asking for help. That seemed somewhat unhelpful given that I started off here, but the tech person did try and help although he was unfortunately less able than me.

I've since managed to isolate the problem to EE. I put a 3 sim card into my phone and using 3's service I was able to get onto Stadia using mobile data without any issue. This therefore eliminates the problem being Google and also eliminates the problem being hardware related (i.e. my mobile phone). The problem is with EE.

When using 3's service they obviously use their own access point name (APN) settings to give access to their network. Looking at 3's APN settings and comparing this to EE's APN settings, there is very little difference. I am attaching both to this post. The one thing that I noted was 3's APN MNC setting is 20 whereas EE's APN MNC setting is 30. This seems reasonable having looked further into this as 3 only has one MNC setting available whereas EE have five (three for T-Mobile and two for Orange, with 30 being the default). Further info about this can be found here (scoll down to United Kingdom and look for MCC = 234 coupled with MNC = 30 for EE).

Could someone now take a proper look at this issue? The above has narrowed the issue down specifically to EE.

Thanks,

James

[smxldn]

APN settings:

3 APN Screen 013 APN Screen 02

EE APN Screen 01EE APN Screen 02

[Jon_K]

Thanks for doing this, @smxldn.

Now that the issue has been narrowed down and appears to be on the EE Network, an investigation ticket will need to be raised.

I'm sorry to ask you to call again, but an investigation ticket would need to be raised by our Tech Gurus.

It sounds like you haven't spoken to them yet, or this would of been completed already. An investigation ticket would be the best way to come to a resolution.

Jon

[mikeliuk]

Hi @smxldn ,

While you follow the above good advice, I think one thing to try is to add a new APN with the same EE settings before except that APN type be IPV4 instead of IPV4V6 (dual-stack).

I believe the Three APN that you have listed would give you a publicly routable IPv4 address so the above is worth a shot if only to see the effect, if any.

[smxldn]

@Jon_K Will do Jon. Thanks.

@mikeliuk Thanks Mike: good advice. I did try this previously: unfortunately, EE does not seem to allow IPv4 anymore. When I set up the APN for IPv4 only, no data connection could get established. If you grab a sec and could test if that's the same issue for you, I'd appreciate it. Thx.

[mikeliuk]

Hi @smxldn ,

That's a surprising result to hear as dropping from IPV4V6 to IPV4 is quite a frequent workaround on this forum.

In my case, I use a Netgear MR1100 and the EE configuration was delivered to the device automatically either via a database in the firmware or over the network from the service provider.

(As an aside, I also receive T-Mobile/everywhere and Virgin Media/goto.virginmobile.uk configurations but have never tried them as they appear to be legacy configurations.)

APN Name: EE

APN: everywhere

PDP: IPV4

RDP Roaming: IPV4

Authentication: None

Username: <empty>

Password: <empty>

I'm aware that other users require CHAP/PAP for authentication and the Username and Password fields filled.

I've previously seen the reverse that when I switch to IPV4V6, I lose connectivity and I currently suspect this is because the Netgear MR1100 does not support 464xlat or dual-stack properly (I believe modern Android and iPhones are fine with IPV4V6).

The Netgear MR1100 supports IPv6 on the WAN but not on the LAN which I think is so that they can claim IPv6 support but in practice I'm not aware of any configuration that could get meaningful IPv6 usage to work with LAN devices.