1.6Gbit connection new smart hub (white, small box) sporadic issues? DNS MITM?

[allamavortex]

Hello all,

So I recently changed my service from 900mbit to 1.6Gbit and that involved a change of router and obviously the OR ONT on the wall.

Ever since having it installed there seems to be an issue with (most likely DNS issues). Whatever is loaded/playing/game continue to work, but I have spells where NO further DNS requests seem to make it through.

I totally forgot to nslookup during one of these issues, but I will the next time it happens (it's pretty frequent and annoying). I can ping 8.8.8.8 (google) whilst being unable to load any webpages on any device/browser. Thus removing the possibility of it being localised to a single machine/device as some were using the router, some were set to DNS over HTTPS and some were using Google's 8.8.8.8 etc. 

It is very much like the router is playing the MITM and intercepting the requests and then slowly, or failing to process these requests at all for a period of time which ranges up to about 45 seconds.

As I said, cached requests, or those already in process are fine, but even something as trivial as trying to watch a YT video is met with 45 seconds of nothing, totally unable to look up ANY address, but established connections and new connections not requiring DNS all work fine.

I'm not really one for conspiracies but I really feel like this new router is intercepting (MITM), attempting to do something with, and failing the DNS requests. This behaviour is only been present since getting the new Smart Hub (the tall, thing white one).

I did a quick google and it seems I'm not alone with this - is anyone else noticing this type of behavior?

Mixture of wired and wireless devices, same behaviour.

[jasonpartington]

So it seems were all facing the same issue, but i have a funny feeling were not all on the same firmware as according to EE im on a slightly earlier firmware but still affected.

Ive just spoke to ee support and they have someone already looking into this issue, it seems around 5-10 customers have called over the last week or so.

He strongly advised everyone with the issue to phone in, he said unless lots of customers are affected it wont be top of there priority list, although he did say they are actively looking into the issue, for now im reverting back to my older wifi 6 asus crab router and im looking at ubiquity equipment anyway.

Its such a shame as the ee router has the potential to be a good bit of kit, but simple exclusions like dns management and even having the ability to manually select the 5ghz channel

[Britboy4321]

Just a bit of advice to anyone who originally used the 'automatically make all my wifi stuff work with my new EE router' functionality.  If you do go to a different router to escape this nightmare .. completely unplug the EE router altogether FROM THE MAINS, otherwise everything gets awfully confused and you'll have 'Connected, no internet' appearing all over your devices...

Also if someone is reading this in November, Or 2026, and thinks 'Oh yea, they fixed that' can you write a reply to this thread please so the crowd of us that have given up and packed the EE router in a cupboard altogether know it may be worth another go ..?

[10suraj10]

@Rach_H  tagging ee community mod to flag to their attention to escalate this issue.

[jasonpartington]

I second this 😂 as im now about to pack the ee router away and go back to my trusty asus router.

Im also going shopping for some ubiquiti access points as ive needed an excuse to buy some.

[ryajohnst]

I spent about an hour on the phone to EE this lunchtime split roughly between an overseas call centre and then one in the UK. I got the latter to bring up and read this thread and he said the issue would be looked at and he would get back to me in 24-48 hours. So I'll see what that brings.

He did mention that reports of this issue have only been coming in since they released version r3 of their firmware in early July. But my current Smart Home Pro is running r2.64.6 and I'm unsure what the original router was running and I'm nowhere near to check just now.

[bobpullen]

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@ryajohnst wrote:

But my current Smart Home Pro is running r2.64.6 and I'm unsure what the original router was running and I'm nowhere near to check just now.

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That's the latest build for the Pro as far as I know.

I've had a Pro on a 1.6Gbps line for some time now and I haven't observed any of these failures; not that I've noticed anyway. I do have DHCP disabled in favour of a Pihole on the network though (which I see others are reporting some success with).

I suspect the ability to change DNS is coming to the Pro at some point as it has already been made availalable for the Plus routers. It really shouldn't be necessary though and the DNS forwarding on the hub should be working properly. This said, I'm not convinced this is solely a DNS resolution/response issue based on some of the shared evidence e.g. it affecting DoH, hub not responding to pings etc. Feels like something else might be going on.

For those experiencing problems, are you using any of the other software features on the hub I wonder? e.g. WiFi Enhancer or Parental Controls?

As there are a few techincally minded folk here, I wonder if somebody is able to script something that would provide a source of ongoing monitoring and provide insight into any patterns/recurrences.

Perhaps a lookup to a hostname e.g. bbc.co.uk every x seconds using: -

• the hub IP as the DNS resolver, and
• a third party DNS server as the resolver, e.g. 1.1.1.1

Then something similar that pings: -

• the hub IP
• an external server (that won't mind you repeatedly pinging it) e.g. pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com

Would help to see if there are any patterns/correlations? 

If I can shuffle my network around a bit and revert to using DHCP on the hub then I might give it a bash myself. 

[ryajohnst]

I'm not using any additional software features on the hub and I double-checked as this did cross my mind as to potentially interfere with things.

I've set off a script to do what you've asked that will run every 15 seconds. I'll leave it running for a couple of hours, parse the output into something manageable and report back.

[TraderTravel]

Well sadly it seems you are right. This might only partially be a DNS issue. I've noticed that everything stopped later this afternoon, and that was after a forced restart of the hub for a totally unrelated issue.

Seems packets are being dropped, or are coming back malformed. I don't have conclusive news without setting up logging which I might attempt tomorrow. Clearly we also have DNS issues with this firmware release, but I think everyone on this thread now realises this is an issue.

I really don't know what to say, but this is clearly a product of almost zero testing by EE's firmware development team.

I'm quite tempted to set up a monitor via thinkbroadband's site and see what comes back.

edit: EE have disabled the ability to accept a ping on this router...

[ryajohnst]

I've left a script running for an hour which in parallel does the following every 15 seconds:

• DNS lookup for bbc.co.uk using the Smart Home Pro resolver
• DNS lookup for bbc.co.uk using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 resolver
• Ping the Smart Home Pro (average of 4 replies)
• Ping bbc.co.uk (average of 4 replies)

This was run from my laptop using 6Ghz Wi-Fi 7 sitting about 5 metres away from the router while the connection wasn't being used at all for any other reason.

There was quite a bit of data, but I've cut the vast majority of it out and been left with the following:

This shows at least 3 periods during that hour which DNS requests (through any possible means) completely failed. It also shows a markedly increased response time from the router during these periods, whereas somehow the response time from external addresses remains the same.

I could run the script for longer but I'd need to set up something to properly parse the data, but I don't think we would learn anything new from doing so. 

[Britboy4321]

Really useful data, thankyou.

Someone else said that EE tech are actually analysing this thread, so this stuff is probably invaluable for them finding the problem.

I've gone back to my old router, so I'm paying for 1.6 whilst enjoying 1.0 speed internet.

So you helping out like this, especially if it expedites a fix, means a lot.  Thanks.

EDIT - and your pings look exactly like my real life experience - like, you're accurately describing exactly my symptoms.