Salient Soft

This follows on from my previous post here.

I had to use the mobile router backup in anger for the first time last Friday. Unfortunately, as I had not used it since 2023, the remaining minutes, existing sim and phone number had expired, as I had forgotten to periodically refresh them. After around 6 months or 179 days your sim/account hibernates, as per here. You have another 90 days to reactivate it after which it dies completely.

I therefore had to obtain another sim. I ordered a free one from EE by phone, but as this was going to take a few days to arrive, I just went to the local EE shop and bought a sim with inclusive 25Gb data pack for £15.

To manage the sim online at any time (which is the most convenient way) you register a new account with My EE here. Once you have done this, you can register the new sim with My EE by logging into your new account and selecting ‘Link a product’ and giving the SIM’s phone number. Note that a confirming text will be send to the sim phone number with a code which you must enter online. The easiest way to do this is to use a mobile to connect to the 4GEE router’s own wifi, and then visit 192.168.1.1 and login using the password you used when setting up the 4GEE mobile router. From the admin pages for the router, you can select the Status page option, which then has an SMS inbox link. This will allow you to view the text and get the confirmation code to register the SIM online. You can then select Manage Products when you log in to My EE, and your sim will appear in the list.

Note that when adding more data for the sim there is a difference between an addon as mentioned in the previous post, and a new subscription pack. The addon prices seem to be significantly more than just allowing the subscription pack to renew. You can change to another subscription pack but you have to stop the first pack completely, which you can do via a text or by visiting My EE and managing your pack(s) here. I will need to stop my pack (i.e. stop the auto renewal) within 30 days to stop it trying to renew. I believe this will still allow the minutes to be used, but the usual timeouts will apply, i.e. the data expires in 30 days for the pack that I bought.

Note also that all EE payg from March 2023 is limited to 25Mb download – I must have just missed this last time which is why I got the faster rates. As that original SIM has now died my new sim is subject to the limit. This is not too bad as the speed is still perfectly acceptable for streaming etc. The maximum is not much faster than the previous speeds of up to 20Mb that I was getting with the mobile router in the house, but as I have already set up the EZCOO usb extender, it is still worth keeping as I am still getting the best speed I can especially if reception conditions are difficult.

Also I used backup switchover ‘in anger’ – generally seems good, takes a few minutes either way. However once or twice when I turned off the mobile router completely in the Fritz internet mobile menu, the DSL popped up instantly which looked suspicious – as if it was already working and back on but didn’t show it. It does however have to be on for 30 minutes continuously in order for the auto switch from backup to happen.
At the end of the day, it is easy to switch mobile completely on or off in the menu, so manually switching over at any time if desired is straight forward, but the auto switch was pretty good.

Note that when the mobile router is in use via the fritz box, the DSL connection appears completely off/dead even if the FTTC connection is all working. You also cannot do a DSL test with the Fritz Box when the mobile backup is active, and neither can you do a full end to end test from the ZEN portal.

Re Zen diagnosis, whilst Zen were quick to respond and helpful, their outage page still showed no outage at all for our area code even when we had experienced the outage for several days intermittently, so we did not discover what the actual problem was that OpenReach were fixing. Zen did point out that you can run your own diagnostic test from the portal login, by selecting diagnostics after logging in, and then selecting (in my case) the business fibre 2 product (i.e. fttc). You then get a popup with a diagnostic link which takes you to a diagnostic test page to run a test. You can also see the history of tests either you or zen engineers have done. In my case this went back to the previous failures in 2023, all of which were there.

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This follows on from my previous post here.

Addition of a USB extender

As before, the mobile router performed around 4 times faster in the wooden garden office than in the brick build house, so it made sense to locate the router there when in use. However, I still wanted to allow shared internet around the house and on wifi when using the backup, and doing this another way e.g. by trying to share the connection from a windows PC in the garden office was not straightforward, and prevented the features of the Fritz box like its wifi from being used. I therefore obtained an EZCOO 50m USB extender for this, to allow the mobile router to still be connected to the Fritz Box in the house, but located in the garden office. When initially connecting the EE router to my TV PC via the USB extender, I received errors like “The last USB device you connected to this computer has malfunctioned and windows doesn’t recognize it”. Initially This appeared to be cable length related, as if it was a data corruption issue, as it failed on a full run to garden office with generous 7m flex cable at garden end. The full run was likely around the 50m max that was quoted by the EZCOO usb extender. However, this can also be caused by usb driver related issues. I tried to shorten the run by using the shortest cables I could each side of the Cat6 SWA run to the garden office. After this tidying up and retrying, the EE mobile router connected ok.

Significantly, I also received this error when testing the connection with my S22 Ultra mobile, again over the extender. However, when switching to using an older IOCELL Netdisk backup disk via its USB2 connection, it connected fine, which would tend to point more to driver or usb compatibility issues. Crucially, the Netdisk was able to copy significantly sized files both ways successfully over the full distance, indicating that the USB extender was working fine. Also and importantly, connecting the mobile router via the extender to the Fritz Box worked fine – the fritz box did not complain and always connected, but as always generally takes several minutes to switch over correctly between the primary and backup provider.

I continued to try file copying tests over the EE router connected to the TV PC via the extender, and these were all successful including 2-3GB copies to and from a OneDrive share. One issue that muddied the waters a lot was Windows file system caching of data both under Windows and with OneDrive – this led me to think copying had been completed when it hadn’t, or when a cache had been used to avoid the copy. Once I eliminated these issues all the tests were fine.

After retesting again today I had no problems connecting or speed testing, including tests done with the mobile router connected to the Fritz Box. I have had an occasional issue where speed test upload test did not work at all. I think that this may be a general ee mobile contention issue and perhaps if the upload link is too slow, ookla speed test just doesn’t bother and gives up.

DNS Issues

During the last couple of days, DNS has not been an issue with Zen overrides set, or by leaving the provider defaults. DNS still seems like it might be an issue, so it may be necessary to try another free public override on the DNS. The top rated free public servers are generally Cloud, Google, and OpenDNS, and details of these may be found on TechRadar here or on Broadband Genie here.

Points re topup and sim expiry

The terminology and process on this was not entire clear initially:-

• Firstly you need to purchase more credit, using a credit card, via ee.co.uk/topup . This can be done from any internet connection, by entering the mobile router phone number twice to authenticate (you don’t need a password to do this). The number was not listed in the paperwork for the router so I wrote it down on the paperwork for convenience.
• After you top up, i.e. buy credit, you need to visit add-on.ee.co.uk/purchase to get additional data using the credit you just purchased. Note that the word ‘purchase’ in the url here is ambiguous as you have already made a purchase with a credit card – you are just cashing in your credit to buy data. Note that in order to do this stage, your PC must be directly connected to the mobile router, i.e. you cannot be connected via the fritz box, even when it is in backup mode with the mobile router active. You get a choice of sizes, and you must have purchased enough credit previously to cover the size you want.
• In addition, it appears that there is a 6 month sim expiry issue for the PAYG sim used in the mobile router, as per here. You need to not just use the mobile router but also spend money every 6 months (180 days) or the SIM expires and you also lose any credit you had. You can phone EE to recover an expired SIM as detailed here, but if after 273 days you have done nothing, the sim and number expire completely and you will need a new sim and number. Therefore I decided my best option if not needing the backup for extended periods is to use it around twice a year before the 180 days expires, and buy the minimum minutes package (which is £5 at the time of writing).

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I obtained an EE mobile router as backup for the occasions when my main FTTC internet goes down. The main internet went down recently for and extended period due to an OpenReach Fibre connection issue to the exchange.

EE have the best mobile data coverage for my area per the ofcom coverage site here.

Zen internet sent me an EE mobile router as backup during the above outage (I presume they knew that EE had the best coverage in my area).

I was able to readily plug the router into a PC and get mobile coverage.

However, doing this via my Fritzbox 7530 needed some tweaking. The fritzbox has mobile internet backup capability via a submenu on its internet menu. This allows enabling the mobile router (plugged in via its usb port) as a backup only when the main internet is down.

Initially when I tried this having unplugged the main DSL connection, the internet showed as up, but DNS translation did not work. I found that under the internet menu/Account Information/DNS Server settings, I had overridden the DNSV4  servers provided by the ISP with specific Zen ones. Once I returned this setting to “use DNSv4 servers assigned by the internet service provider (recommended)”, DNS then worked on the mobile connection. In addition, automatic failover to mobile worked correctly when I unplugged the DSL connection, although this did take a few minutes to stabilise and was not instant.

In practice, I planned not to leave the mobile router plugged in, but to connect when needed. However, the fact that it is capable of providing shared internet and wifi via the router to my whole network was a real plus.

I found that the EE mobile router performed particularly well from my garden office (which is of wooden construction). I obtained approx 50Mb down and 1 Mb up in this situation – the down link speed was actually better than my FTTC which is around 32Mb. However in the house via the Fritzbox 7530, this reduced to around 20Mb down, presumably due to the brick construction blocking the signal more than the wooden building did.

However, in both of these situations the mobile data rate was way better than I had previously obtained by tethering my Vodafone Mobile – in the latter case, the connection was very slow and intermittent – sometimes I could not get a connection at all, so it would have been no use as a backup for remote working. The EE mobile router was perfectly suited for use as a remote working backup, although I planned not to leave it plugged in permanently as a hot backup but to manually plug in when required, as it was not instant anyway, and in practice I may have to buy additional minutes from EE as they seem to expire if you don’t use them within a set period.

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Having got CouchDB working under Windows 11 with the legacy places data as per this post here, I then wanted to run the legacy places angular and ionic apps if possible, just for reference and to consider my options going forward.

The angular app was in v6.1.7 which I did not want to revisit and upgrade. Similarly, the ionic app was an earlier legacy version which could be tricky to reinstate under windows 11.

However, I did have already built distributions for both apps, and both were able to run successfully under Windows 11 via http-server without having to install anything else. For angular I used the existing build under the dist subdirectory, and for Ionic I the build is under the www subdirectory. Note that whilst the index.html for the Ionic version did specify that cordova.js was required, and caused a load error in the web console, this was not an issue when using from a browser as it was not needed.

I did want to be able to run them remotely as well, from other PCs and mobiles. I tried installing the distributions under Zen hosting, with remote access to CouchDB running on the local PC. However, this would not run under HTTPS as it meant having mixed content – the access to CouchDB was not HTTPS and I did not want to go to the trouble of installing a self signed cert locally to get it all to work – this excercise was not worth the effort. I could not find an easy way under Zen cpanel of allowing just this app to be HTTP only, with everything else defaulting to HTTPS. If I turned off forced defaulting to HTTPS in cpanel, the app worked fine under HTTP but other access was also allowed to be HTTP only which I did not like, so I dumped the idea of hosting under Zen directly. I did hit a spate of nasty looking cpanel issues when I did this and for a while thought I had broken the domain/ssl/cpanel access entirely whilst messing with domain/alias/redirect settings in cpanel, but in the end it all worked fine again.

I therefore continued to run/host locally via http-server. I did want to be able to potentially remote boot my local PC via Fritz and access the app from anywhere, which would mean auto running the http-servers at boot time. The easiest way to do this turned out to be to use the windows task scheduler, which unlike services can run batch files without any other tools such as srvany which is commonly used to do this for services. Whilst the scheduler is often used with time based triggers, it is perfectly possible to specify a trigger as ‘run at boot time’. I also specified that it should run without any user logged in, therefore with local access only/no user authentication. This worked fine and I could boot the PC and then immediately access the places apps from a mobile without logging in.

Another trick needed was to add some remote port sharing in the Fritz box for both apps, via my static IP addresses. When doing this I also had to add a port share for the CouchDB access, otherwise CouchDB also complained about mixing private CORS stuff with the remote access. Once I did this, and changed the app config to use the remote URL for CouchDB access, it all worked fine. Fortunately, I could also continue to access the same apps locally on the hosting PC even though they were still using the remote URL for CouchDB access – it all worked fine.

I then set up redirects under cpanel from Zen to make the app access look a bit more friendly with salient soft urls, and this all ran fine.

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I am running 2 x CAT6 SWA cables to a garden office, along with a 6mm SWA cable for mains power.

I checked widely online about the wisdom of going with CAT6 SWA UTP vs FTP or S/FTP, and opinions as to how well this will all work vary widely – it was very hard to get a clear consensus on performance, particularly re the issue of how close you can run the CAT6 cable to a mains cable without compromising performance, although a number of posts cited not having any problems in practice. I had already opted for SWA UTP for simplicity, having previously reckoned that CAT5e might even be enough. The plan was to put a gigabit switch at each end, which should give far more performance than actually needed – The need to shovel large amounts of data between the house and the garden office would be minimal – possibly occasional copies to/from the TV pc, and some RDP use from the house to an office PC. The main need is to facilitate connection to the internet, which is a moderate speed FTTC connection to Zen Internet, typically giving about 30Mb/s down and 6-7Mb/s up, after significant effort by Zen and OpenReach to solve some line/connection problems. Slower internet is the price for living in a quiet rural area!

Having already obtained the cable, I was reluctant to switch and also have the additional size and larger bend radius of S/FTP, plus the additional complexity of the correct earthing and screened keystones etc.. I planned to just ask the installer to try to maximise the distance between the network and mains runs of cable, but was concerned enough at a late stage to try a simple test.

I ran an old cat5 UTP cable of around 15m in length as close as possible to a long mains extension, such that for around 7-8metres the 2 cables were tightly adjacent all the way along. I then connected one PC to a switch via this cable, and then ran a lan speed test from this PC to another target PC on the same switch, using LanBench on both PCs, a simple open source lan tester. I ran various tests both with the mains lead unplugged, plugged in, and actively powering a 2KW fan heater, all while the test was running. Whilst initially I did get some significant variation in performance, after experimenting I concluded that this was not due to the mains cable – some other factor was at play. In the end I ran with 2048 byte packets, and 4 simultaneous connections – it was upping the connection count to 4 from 1 which gave better and more consistent performance all round.

The results gave a send rate of approx 900-1000Mb/sec, and a receive rate of 250-300Kb/sec. Crucially, this level of performance was the same whether or not the mains was connected or in use during the test, and over a significant number of repeated tests.

This was not a definitive test, and it was over a much shorter distance than the SWA cable. The latter will likely be around 40m, but hopefully with minimal closeness to the mains cable compared to this test. The test did however rebut a significant number of posts online which said on no account must the cables be closer than a few inches and even if perpendicular you could get issues. Whilst the official rules might in theory mandate tighter restrictions to ensure all edge cases are covered, this simple test did give reassurance. In addition, the SWA cable would be CAT6 rather than CAT5, and the earthing of the SWA shield should go some way to help with screening interference at mains frequencies as well, in addition to the balanced line working of the twisted pairs which would eliminate common mode interference.

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