No public IP address with Vodafone 5G broadband? (and what about Eir/Three?)

Bob24 · 04-02-2022 10:29pm #1

OK, so I was a bit fed-up with Virgin Media's commercial practices and ordered Vodafone's 5G home broadband router to see if it it could replace Virgin. I am actually quite pleased both with data speeds (most of the time it is faster than Virgin's 250MBPS offer) and with the Huawei 5G router they provide which seems like a nice piece of kit, so I was about to call Virgin to cancel my broadband service with them.

And comes the issue: I just realised that the modem auto-configures to the APN hs.vodafone.ie which I believe is that same one used for mobile internet access on phones. This means you are not getting assigned a public IP address and instead are getting a private address behind NAT. This is a major issue for me as I am running a small server which needs to be publicly accessible on the internet.

I am actually quite surprised about this, as while it is using the mobile network it is supposed to be a home broadband service, and any home broadband service I ever used did provide public IP addresses.

Does anyone know whether it is the expected behaviour, and if there is any way to get a public address upon request from Vodafone and/or by configuring a different APN?

And if not, would anyone know if Eir and Three are also giving private addresses behind NAT for their 5G home broadband services (I doubt their frontline staff would be able to understand/answer that question ...).

smuggler.ie · 04-02-2022 11:32pm

Three does apply public IP on certain APN's but its hit&miss. So far for me it worked, but there was thread about it year or so ago and different experience was voiced.

kippy · 04-02-2022 11:37pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058231430/no-public-ip-address-with-vodafone-5g-broadband-and-what-about-eir-three

Whats NAS?

04-02-2022 11:40pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118584294#Comment_118584294

network access server

Bob24 · 04-02-2022 11:41pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118584294#Comment_118584294

Sorry this was a typo, I meant to write NAT of course (network address translation).

Bob24 · 04-02-2022 11:43pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118584218#Comment_118584218

Thanks, this is good to know although the fact that it doesn't seem to be a consistent practice is a bit of a worry.

smuggler.ie · 04-02-2022 11:51pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118584373#Comment_118584373

TBH i am even surprised they still issue public on mobile (BB). It remain public(not static) as long i dont change APN

try live.vodafone.com , sure no harm to call VF and ask

kippy · 04-02-2022 11:55pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118584347#Comment_118584347

Ok.

Isn't NAT in play on every ISP? (ie between your LAN and the WAN side of the ISP's device in your house)

Bob24 · 05-02-2022 12:05am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118584481#Comment_118584481

You router is doing NAT (because each device on your LAN has a private address). But the router itself has a public address on its WAN interface. And there is an option on the router to direct traffic coming into the public address towards a host on the LAN. For example if you have a web server with the private address 192.168.0.2 on your LAN, you can have your router forward any incoming traffic for port 80 on its public address towards 192.168.0.2 on the LAN interface, and your web server will be accessible from the internet.

The problem with Vodafone's 5G broadband is that the WAN interface of the router isn't getting a public address. It is getting a private one and there is NAT going on inside Vodafone's network. So there is no way to expose any host on your LAN to the internet since NAT is happening outside your own network device and thus you can't setup port forwarding.

kippy · 05-02-2022 12:22am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118584594#Comment_118584594

Ah ok, CGNAT.

Your options are to use another BB Provider or use something like ngrok or openport (there may be more) but whether these would work would depend on your use cases and there are costs etc involved.

Easiest option is different BB provider I would think.

Bob24 · 05-02-2022 12:33am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118584701#Comment_118584701

I’ll give it a try tomorrow, but actually since the router has an option to connect to a VPN, one work around I was thinking of is to have it connect to a VPN service which provides a public IP, and hopefully it would do the trick (I have an account with a VPN provider anyway so there is no extra cost).

But yeah TBH I will try more out of curiosity and I am not sure I want to complexity things too much (and add an account extra network layer which can cause issues or limit bandwidth). Agree that if it isn’t working out of the box it is better to find another provider which delivers what I want.

Shoog · 10-02-2022 11:35pm

Where we are three only offer carrier grade NAT which means no public IP address, they all resolve to single gateway in Dublin. The IP you are allocated changes on a daily basis as well which causes issues if you bridge their modem to your router ( I have a little script which test pings Google and resets the connection if missing for 5 calls 10 secs apart).

It seems that until ipv6 becomes the norm cgnat will become more and more common.

RoundCube · 17-02-2022 7:21pm

5gbroadband.ie guys provide static public IPs.

brav · 18-02-2022 12:34am

Have you used them? Their website and Facebook page make it look like a guy operating it from his shed

Are they more of a WISP or are they piggy backing on Eir or VF etc?

No public IP address with Vodafone 5G broadband? (and what about Eir/Three?)

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