Websites intermittently not connecting. Advice please?

[Cloudy147]

Hi all,

This is doing my head in. Some websites (no rhyme or reason that I can fathom) just won't connect and timeout. Then, after a few minutes they usually work if refreshed. Recent examples such as currys.co.uk, news.bbc.co.uk just wouldn't connect. I checked downforall and they are up at the time.

All devices have same issue at the same time that are connected to my wifi.

If I change my wifi from my home broadband, to tether my phone they all work immediately. Simiarly if I disconnect wifi on my phone and use 4G it works fine. Turn it back on, and it fails again. At the time those websites fail, I could pick any other random website and it'll work (ebay for example). The failures aren't consistent either. Just now it failed to reach maps.google.co.uk and a couple of others... but currys.co.uk was fine.

My home broadband is with Vodafone and I believe this is where the problem lies. Before I switched to them it was BT and never had a problem. I've been in touch with Voda support and they were, of course, no help. They said they couldn't see a problem on the line and have 'refreshed' the router (whatever thats supposed to mean) and its not made a difference.

Has anyone experienced something similar, and could offer some advice as to where I need to guide the Voda 'support' people please?

Thanks,

Paul.

[colin79666]

It's not DNS. It can't possibly be DNS. It was DNS.

Seriously on your pc/tablet change dns to 9.9.9.11 or 1.1.1.2 and see if the problem goes away. If it does then see if you change it in the router settings so all devices benefit.

[technobob]

Are you using your isp router in modem mode and using a netgear router attached?

If so Netgear have issued firmware updates which have broken dns since around last June. there is a rough and ready work around.

If this is your setup let me know and i'll put it up on this thread.

[Cloudy147]

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestions, I wondered if it might be DNS. I changed to the suggestion above, but didn't make a difference (assuming I've done it correctly).

Its a Voda router, not a netgear one. Ironcially I can't get to the Vodafone support pages because of the issue. Pistonheads is working fine though!

Tried tethering my phone to my PC instead and then logging the issue with Vodafone, but I keep getting unknown errors on their web page when trying to login. What a total shower of st this is. 23 long, long months of this crap to go before I can do one to another provider.

Any other ideas greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I think I edited DNS incorrectly as I did it on my laptop, not the router. When I tried to logon to the router, it was unavailable. I therefore reset the router and set it up again. I can now access the DNS settings, so if it happens again, I'll retry this approach!

Edited by Cloudy147 on Friday 21st January 20:06