Teamviewer access on EE4G

[benphillips]

Hi,

We have had to put in a 4G broadband connection in an office because the standard landline broadband speeds are woeful. The 4G speeds on EE are much better and the internet connection is fine across the office. However, we have Teamviewer installed on some of the machines in the office to allow remote access, and Teamviewer does not detect an internet connection. We also have AnyDesk installed on one machine, and this constantly has the message "Trying to connect to network". It would appear that something is blocking these connections. Can anyone shed any light? We are using a Zyxel router rather than an EE router and so could make changes if necessary.

Any advice greatfully recieved!

[XRaySpeX]

You may be up against a limitation of EE's mobile network. The EE mobile network uses Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT) resulting in a double NAT, which means that you don't get your own public IP address but share it with other users. So you can't be uniquely id'ed on the Net & therefore your LAN cannot be addressed from outside for unsolicited accesses. This is unlike fixed BB.

If that's the case there is nowt you can do to avoid it.

[benphillips]

Thanks XRaySpeX.

The machines running Teamviewer and AnyDesk are inside the network and are just not able to connect the the relevant services outside the network via the 4G connection. That may be the way that these connections are implemented and they need to be able to find a path back inside the local network which will be scuppered by CGNAT.

I'll see if I can get more info from Teamviewer and AnyDesk, but appreciate your response.

Anyone else have any experience with Teamviewer or AnyDesk across EE 4G?

Thanks.

[XRaySpeX]

Solicited responses to requests inside the LAN should be OK & not hindered by CGNAT.

[benphillips]

Thanks XRaySpeX.

My understanding was that Teamviewer was able to deal with CGNAT as it initiates a connection from client software running on the remote machine.

Also, our router is only connecting with an IPv6 address and not an IPv4 address. Does EE use CGNAT for IPv6 addresses?

Does anyone know if it is possible to get an IPv4 connection to EE on 4G. Perhaps this is the cause of the connection issues on Teamviewer and not CGNAT.

Is anyone at EE able to provide any insight into this?

With thanks.

[James_B]

Hi @benphillips,

Welcome to the EE Community. 🙂

I'd recommend contacting the software developer for support. They'll be able to confirm if their product is compatible with CGNAT and if they have a version available which is IPv6 ready.

James

[benphillips]

Thank you for your input James.

I wish it was that easy to get information from Teamviewer. I have contacted them directly but not had any definitive answer as to whether Teamviewer clients can operate successfully from behind CGNAT. From my understanding it can, so I can't see any particular reason why Teamviewer clients can't connect to the Teamviewer network.

I have tested with AnyDesk too, and get the same issue: AnyDesk is unable to connect to the AnyDesk network, and so not remote access to machines in the office is currently possible. It is something to do with the the EE 4G network, but I can't see what. I have searched EE's forums but not found anything that provides any help.

Has anyone else come across this issue: unable to access machines remotely that are connected through EE 4G? I'm tearing my hair out here!

[James_B]

Hi @benphillips,

I don't have any personal experience with the applications you are using. Have you checked you are using the latest versions? It could be that you are using an older version that doesn't include IPv6 support.

If you are, I would recommend reaching out to the developers. I can see TeamViewer has its own community at community.teamviewer.com/English/.

Hope this helps.

James

[XRaySpeX · Accepted solution]

 It might be an EE IPv6 issue. EE has introduced IPv6 on its mobile network, but it doesn't fall-back to IPv4 nicely. Can you change the Profile/APN on your EE devices to APN Protocol = IPv4 only?

[benphillips]

@XRaySpeX 

Thanks for the further suggestion.

The router is set to connect with IPv4 and IPv6, but it doesn't get an IPv4 address and shows as disconnected. It only shows as connected with an IPv6 address. If I change the APN settings on the 4G router to connect with IPv4 only, then there is no internet connection, suggesting that EE does not support IPv4 at all!

Argh!