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Anybody have VPN problems on Three UK?

Mark.J

Administrator
Staff member
ISPreview Team
I've had a few reports from Pay Monthly customers of Three's mobile service (not their home broadband plans), which claim that the operator appears to be blocking access to OpenVPN and WireguardVPN. One person said you can bypass it on some SIM contracts by swapping the APN from three.co.uk to 3internet, to make it treat you as a broadband customer, but that's not ideal as it breaks some things for mobile users (e.g. MMS).

I should add that this is with Three's Content Filter service disabled. Just wondering if anybody else is able to test this, as I don't use either VPN provider myself?
 
Using three.co.uk APN, on monthly phone contract.

I am just using PIA, and OpenVPN seems to work fine. Wireguard seems quite unhappy though.
 
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Wireguard working fine here on port 443, on 2 lines, 1 on mobile using three.co.uk apn, and router on 3internet.
SSTP on 443 also working,
Im not able to test openvpn.
 
Never changed APN and Wireguard to my own server has constantly worked fine on two different SIMs. Maybe some of the IPs people are connecting to are blacklisted, I notice quite a lot of HCaptchas when on Three IPs, I think people setup proxy/bot networks with smarty sims because of how cheap the data plans are and missue them. This could be a sign that Three are finally starting to do something about it
 
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Both NordVPN and Surfshark working fine on 3internet APN, although i have to disable Surfshark to access this website as it returns a Permission error....
 
Using Speedify over Three without issue. _but_ I do have to reconnect every 15 minutes or so otherwise it just gets progressively slower and slower until it's unusable. Luckily as its a "bonding" VPN dropping the mobile segment doesn't disrupt the internet. (There are two other legs of Speedify going over 2 x 10mbps VDSL lines).
 
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I've had a few reports from Pay Monthly customers of Three's mobile service (not their home broadband plans), which claim that the operator appears to be blocking access to OpenVPN and WireguardVPN. One person said you can bypass it on some SIM contracts by swapping the APN from three.co.uk to 3internet, to make it treat you as a broadband customer, but that's not ideal as it breaks some things for mobile users (e.g. MMS).

I should add that this is with Three's Content Filter service disabled. Just wondering if anybody else is able to test this, as I don't use either VPN provider myself?

Thanks might explain why my wireguard VPN router not working will look later into that
 
Using Speedify over Three without issue. _but_ I do have to reconnect every 15 minutes or so otherwise it just gets progressively slower and slower until it's unusable. Luckily as its a "bonding" VPN dropping the mobile segment doesn't disrupt the internet. (There are two other legs of Speedify going over 2 x 10mbps VDSL lines).

What you think of speedify ? At moment it seems to be more a failover system for me on my android phone ie don't combine WiFi and 5g connection together to get combine speed , than have speedify VPN issues like BBC iPlayer not working
 
Yea, the phone version appears to do failover only. Probably due to the way mobile operating systems work where they appear to switch off mobile data connectivity when WiFi is present.

Speedify works great for a club house with office admin desktops and guest WiFi users.
I do have to bypass it for streaming services and for a couple of banking websites.

Certainly was a great price, I went for 3 years and at the time they were having a promotional discount too!
 
Yea, the phone version appears to do failover only. Probably due to the way mobile operating systems work where they appear to switch off mobile data connectivity when WiFi is present.

Speedify works great for a club house with office admin desktops and guest WiFi users.
I do have to bypass it for streaming services and for a couple of banking websites.

Certainly was a great price, I went for 3 years and at the time they were having a promotional discount too!
Yea I got a very cheap 3 year deal.. going to give it other try on Apple Mac mini M1 . Ie connect the three and Vodafone routers to ethernet of Apple Mac, and than create a hotspot with the combine connection. If windscribe VPN will work through it whilst combine than might be good.
 
In case it helps anyone who has suffered like me, I am on a Three pay monthly contract and the three.co.uk APN does not allow connection to NordVPN. I had tried everything to get it to work via the NordVPN ios app (tried endless servers and all of the protocols). In the end, changing the APN to 3internet resolved the issue
 
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Wireguard works Ok on smarty so not sure why it's blocked on Three
 
Ivacy user here. I don't use OpenVPN because Ivacy blocks port forwarding on that protocol unless you pay extra. Same with other protocols if I use Ivacy's own app. I manually set up L2TP and SSTP for several servers and found that port forwarding works ok with both Three APNs but I have to kick off a client that uses port forwarding before the port is opened. No problem with all protocols if port forwarding isn't needed.
The point being if your VPN client is blocked you may be able to bypass the block by defining the connection manually with Windows. You will need to know the server name(s) that you'll be connected to.
Try SSTP protocol for starters as that is dead easy to set up manually. Some people don't like it because it's a bespoke MS product but with that caveat it is quite secure.
 
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