Last update: 29 July 2015

I’ve had some downtimes/issues on my Relish.net connection and wanted to track them (these are reported by a two different checks run every five minutes to monitor the connection)

Most of the time everything is fine and with the 3 to 4 bars of signal showing on the router I get around 24 Mbps download (often as high as 30 Mbps) – UPDATE: see the July 29 2015 entry below

Unless an entry says otherwise “lost internet” means I couldn’t ping outside beyond my router but had signal. “soft reboot” is rebooting the router via its management web page. “hard reboot” is powering the router off, waiting for 10 seconds, powering it back on.

• August 10: Lots of weird issues connecting to sites. Turns out the DNS server in the router had stopped working reliably. A soft reboot fixed it.
• August: My network speed sometimes recovers without me doing anything.It effects my wired machines so its not wifi congestion. So I’m guessing its a network or router issue?
• Wed July 29th – I was away for a few weeks and on my return found my connection had slowed down. Now with 4 bars of signal I get around 5 Mbps. I’ve tried repositioning the router, restarting it… but thats the maximum I can achieve. I’m wondering if the Relish network is saturated?
• Sun May 10th 23:00. Too slow to be usable even with 4 bars of signal – soft reboot fixed it.
• Sat May 9th 23:00. Too slow to be usable even with 4 bars of signal – soft reboot fixed it.
• Note I was away for most of April visiting my girlfriend in the US
• Sun March 22nd midnight. Too slow to be usable even with 4 bars of signal. Working online and pressed for time so did a hard reboot
• Wed March 18th 22:21. Too slow to be usable even with 4 bars of signal. Tried a soft reboot but afterwards system was still too slow and now only had one bar of strength. A hard reboot fixed both issues.
• Tue Feb 17th 23:30. Lost internet. Router said it had lost signal which was unusual. A soft reboot didn’t fix it so had to hard reboot.
• Wed Feb 8th 23:30. Lost internet. Router said it had lost signal which was unusual. A soft reboot didn’t fix it so had to hard reboot.
• Tue Feb 3rd. Lost internet – soft reboot fixed it.   I was working online so I didn’t wait to see if it fixed itself.
• Wed Jan 21st. Lost internet – soft reboot fixed it.   I was working online so I didn’t wait to see if it fixed itself.
• Wed Jan 14th 2015. After almost a month of uptime a problem: Lost internet – soft reboot fixed it.   I was working online so I didn’t wait to see if it fixed itself.
• Thur 15th Nov 2014 23:00-23:15 Internet was up but was very slow (as low as 100Kbps) and web pages started timing out. I was using the internet so couldn’t wait to see if it self fixed. Soft reboot fixed it.
• Tues 4th Nov 11:45-11:55  Lost internet – soft reboot fixed it.   I was working online so I didn’t wait to see if it fixed itself.
• Fri 10th Oct 00:20 – 00:50 Lost internet – hard reboot fixed it. Wasn’t at home so couldn’t try anything else.
• Sun Oct 5th 8:00 – 8:15 Lost internet – soft reboot fixed it.  I was working online so I didn’t wait to see if it fixed itself.  After reboot only had two bars and speedtest.net showed the rate at 10 Mbps (half its usual speed). At 8:50 speed still hadn’t recovered – moved the router a couple of inches and it dropped to one bar. Moved it back to its original position and now it had three bars and speedtest.net shows 20 Mbps.
• Tue Sep 30th 17:20 – 17:30 Lost internet – soft reboot fixed it.  I was working online so I didn’t wait to see if it fixed itself.
• Mon Sep 29th 21:12 – 21:28 Lost internet. Tried a hard reboot but made no difference.  Eventually it fixed itself but when the network came back speed had dropped from its usual 20 Mbps to 3 Mbps which was so slow connections were failing, web pages were timing out. Speeds slowly increased and by 23:30 was getting around 14Mbps. By 1 am (at the latest) it was back to normal.
• Sat Sep 20th 10:30 Lost internet – soft reboot fixed it.
• Sat Sep 20th 01:20-7:00 Lost internet – hard reboot fixed it (was a bit bleary so forgot to try the soft reboot first).
• Mon Sep 15th 00:00 – 8:00 (approx) Lost internet – fixed itself.  See also the note below. The power was out in my building from 8 – 10 (yes it was one of those days) so I don’t know exactly when it recovered.
• Sat Sep 13th 11:05 – 13:50 (2 hours 45 minutes) Lost internet – fixed itself
• Sat Sep 6th 18:56 – 19:20 (24 minutes) Lost internet – fixed itself

On the Mon Sep 15 outage I called Relish customer care. Talking to the helpful people at 1am (I really like that they have 24 suport) at their suggestion I tried power cycling the router, removing and re-inserting the SIM, resetting the  router… But none of this helped. So its possible the outage is due to a Relish base station problem of some kind.  I had a look but couldn’t find a Relish.net status page.  Followup: 15 Sept got a call from Relish.net checking that the problem has been resolved for me and confirming that it has been a network outage. Pretty nice of them.

Note: almost always the problem is fixed by soft rebooting the router which suggests that the problem is in the router not the network or signal or anything else.  I’ve looked for an alternate router but not found one yet.  If you know of one please contact me

I have a webcam so when I travel I can keep an eye on my place.  A webcam is one of the few things you might have at home that you connect into from the outside world.

Relish.net, unlike most ISPs, does not allow ordinary non business users to connect in to things like webcams.

Having a dynamic hostname (from somewhere like dyndns.com) will not help. Yes you can find your home IP using it but the Relish  internal network will not allow the incoming connection.

This is a pretty big failing on the part of Relish. I can get by without my webcam but what about people wanting to access their PC while travelling or access a media server (like Plex)…

So if you are considering Relish bear in mind this limitation.

I just called Relish and they only offer a static IP on their business broadband.  On their website the business offering starts at £25 elsewhere I’ve seen that a static IP adds £5 more and there is probably VAT on top of that.  So to access my webcam would add £16 a month and a 12 month contract!

Geek advice: setup a vpn or an ssh tunnel