Rain 5G Experience from ADSL and no Bridge mode...

[dantex]

So I received a notification from rain that my area was now covered. They seem to be adding towers nicely in my area now.
I don't have access to fibre so rely on my trusted ADSL 12Mb down 1Mb up connection that has been rock solid for years.
VDSL is available in my area, but unfortunately no ports are available according to Telkom.

Received the Huawei 5G CPE X router a business day later after ordering. Very quick and efficient process.

Placed said router on my balcony facing the suggested direction and logged into the interface. Good to Excellent signal.
Did my first speedtest and was disappointed at getting 100mb-115Mb down, consistently. That's still 10x what I have on ADSL but was nevertheless expecting more.
Then I remembered, that even though I'm connecting to the 5Ghz band on the router, my old Mac Pro circa 2012 probably has a low end wifi chip.

Swapped to my work machine and boom, 450Mb down and 20-70Mb up.

So far so good.

Now to integrate this bad boy into my existing router and AP setup.
I look for a setting in the Huawei interface, which is barebones and rain centric, but cannot find a setting to change to Bridge mode. Thereby giving my main router control of the private IP's, since I have many static IP's needing port forwarding.

Also no way of changing the subnet mask, locked to 255.255.255.0.
So I have sent the rain support team a mail and will be calling them today, but I do not have high hopes and could land up returning the unit if I cant successfully integrate it.

If anyone has suggestions or if the rain rep could contact me that would be helpful.

 

[Jimmy]

Did my first speedtest and was disappointed at getting 100mb-115Mb down, consistently.

I loled at this. Imagine coming from a 12meg and being disappointed with that speed.

 

[dantex]

I loled at this. Imagine coming from a 12meg and being disappointed with that speed.

I know right!!

 

[PAYBACK]

I loled at this. Imagine coming from a 12meg and being disappointed with that speed.

Its the blue Cool Aid effect I was talking about

 

[McGuywer]

Is your network complicated?

If your ADSL router has a WAN port, you can plug the Rain CPE in there.
If not, why don't you just use the Rain CPE to handle your network? It does a fairly decent job of it.
I use a Mikrotik since I need additional features, otherwise I would have used the Rain CPE.

 

[Gtx Gaming]

So I received a notification from rain that my area was now covered. They seem to be adding towers nicely in my area now.
I don't have access to fibre so rely on my trusted ADSL 12Mb down 1Mb up connection that has been rock solid for years.
VDSL is available in my area, but unfortunately no ports are available according to Telkom.

Received the Huawei 5G CPE X router a business day later after ordering. Very quick and efficient process.

Placed said router on my balcony facing the suggested direction and logged into the interface. Good to Excellent signal.
Did my first speedtest and was disappointed at getting 100mb-115Mb down, consistently. That's still 10x what I have on ADSL but was nevertheless expecting more.
Then I remembered, that even though I'm connecting to the 5Ghz band on the router, my old Mac Pro circa 2012 probably has a low end wifi chip.

Swapped to my work machine and boom, 450Mb down and 20-70Mb up.

So far so good.

Now to integrate this bad boy into my existing router and AP setup.
I look for a setting in the Huawei interface, which is barebones and rain centric, but cannot find a setting to change to Bridge mode. Thereby giving my main router control of the private IP's, since I have many static IP's needing port forwarding.

Also no way of changing the subnet mask, locked to 255.255.255.0.
So I have sent the rain support team a mail and will be calling them today, but I do not have high hopes and could land up returning the unit if I cant successfully integrate it.

If anyone has suggestions or if the rain rep could contact me that would be helpful.

You cannot port forward on rain, the network uses double NAT.

 

[dantex]

Is your network complicated?

If your ADSL router has a WAN port, you can plug the Rain CPE in there.
If not, why don't you just use the Rain CPE to handle your network? It does a fairly decent job of it.
I use a Mikrotik since I need additional features, otherwise I would have used the Rain CPE.

Not so complex actually, I just have portforwarding and dyndns active for IP cameras and other equipment.
Yes my router has a WAN port where the CPE is currently plugged in, no problems as the subnets are different, but now my router can't see the public/external IP so no way for it to tell DynDNS what my external IP is.

My current router has all my online security running, screen time for the kids, Google safe browsing, all remotely monitored/managed via an app. Hence I don't want to move to the CPE which has none of these rich features.

Also, some online games will detect this double NAT and move you to a strict NAT profile which only allows you to play with other players who are on a fully open NAT. Not sure I entirely understand what that means though...

 

[mrlgm007]

You cannot port forward on rain, the network uses double NAT.

I built a VPN from a VPS on AWS to a VM on my network and i can access everything again it was the only thing causing a issue for me as i have a lot of self hosted for personal use stuff.

 

[dantex]

You cannot port forward on rain, the network uses double NAT.

That's a problem.

My router has 2 WAN ports for redundancy, load balancing and smart route.
I could keep my ADSL and rain and force certain devices down 1 or the other WAN.
Sheesh...

 

[cavedog]

Rain connections are behind a Carrier Grade Nat. Tbey likely doing this to prevent users router from being accessed and added to a botnet.

That unfortunately means no incoming connections which is a real shame but for me personally not that big of a deal.

 

[SauRoNZA]

I don’t know of any mobile network based service that has a bridge mode in the conventional sense.

There are however units where you are the Router as the DMZ IP and then it gets the WAN address directly forwarded to it which is likely what needs to happen here.

Port forwarding still isn’t an option which is silly.

 

[labratza]

yeah it is a pain with the Double NAT as there was my server that wanted remote access to that wanted to do some testing but have to wait for my fibre to be in so that can carry on with testing

 

[KnightLion]

You cant port forward with Rain 5G, unless someone managed to do so, please tell me because I cant play any peer to peer games because I'm stuck in a strict NAT situation. I've almost lost my **** trying to resolve this.

 

[dantex]

So thought I'd give a quick update.

On the port forwarding front, my router allows 2 x WAN connections for load balancing and/or failover. So after some trial and error, I have the cameras on my ADSL connection (which I kept but moved from uncapped to 100GB cap) and everything else on Rain.

For online games, if I'm struggling with strict NAT, I move my gaming PC to a static IP which my router then knows to run through ADSL (I have a script on Windows which makes this easy). So far so good.

Like many of us using the shitty Huawei 5G units, internal or external, I've seen degraded performance over time since joining in January. On activation, the portal showed me 515Mbps down which was amazing! You could literally download a 30GB game in minutes. But right now, that figure has more than halved.
According to various media reports, rain is getting hammered over the lockdown period, with the median speeds being cut in half, see below.

Lockdown speeds – One mobile network is getting hammered and suffers more than others

The national lockdown has put pressure on all mobile networks, but one operator’s performance is far worse than all the others.

mybroadband.co.za

Best and worst ISPs during lockdown – Speed and customer satisfaction comparison

The latest MyBroadband speed test results and customer satisfaction ratings reveal which ISPs served their customers the best during the lockdown.

mybroadband.co.za

There were also reports that Vodacom needed some of rain's spectrum, so not sure if that has also contributed to the performance drops.

My connection has always been unstable though, with packets dropping, particularly evident during video calls over this period. Also latency in online games would consistently be around 200ms.

The only thing that fixed both these issues was manually changing the antennae in the management interface. I settled on config 10.
Since then, rock solid and smooth, with latency down to 30ms-50ms.

Another major contributor to better performance was moving the CPEX unit onto the roof from being mounted outside of one of my bedrooms. NR improved from and average of -92 to -79, and download speeds from around 100Mbps to a consistent 200Mbps, varies during the day obviously.
Another upside of the antennae config was the upload speeds; now averaging 40Mbps from a measly 6Mbps (if I was lucky) previously!

To be honest, I have not seen the 5G disconnection issues many have seen here, so far, touch wood.

A strange event did get me thinking though, I needed a longer CAT6 cable to get more slack for the unit moving onto the roof. So I bought a 30m cable and replaced the included flat cable. I was able to connect and the unit powered up, but as soon as I put load on it (running a speed test) the unit would reboot, everytime I ran a speedtest. Returned to the shorter flat cable supplied, all back to normal. So don't know if the unit doesn't like longer cables, or if my cable is of a shitty quality/faulty. Perhaps some issues folks are having could be related to the cable?

I suspect, that when lockdown starts to ease and more folk return to work, we might see pressure on the rain network ease, then maybe we see those higher speeds again.

For now, fixing the antennae and moving the unit onto the roof has me satisfied and should be enough for most folk who are not too far from a tower and have a decent line of sight.
Just wish rain could be more communicative and proactive, they could've saved their brand a whole bunch of hurt and given paying customers a much better experience for their money.

Anybody else notice their Live Chat link is gone? And the link under the 'Manage' section to Optimise is gone as well? I would hate to be in their support organisation now, they must be getting hammered every single day due to the state of their network, lack of professional installation for customers and huge wait times to even get a response out of them.

When/if Fiber does roll in to my neighbourhood, I will immediately switch to them and keep rain as a failover.
But for now, my current, complex configuration is solid, let's see how long that continues though...