Salient Soft

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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