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I can no longer access my baby camera and CCTV after switching to Community Fibre

Hello everyone,

I am hoping someone might shine some light on the issue I am having. I made the switch from Sky (72 Mbps) to Community Fibre (150Mbps) in Feb 2024 and since then, I can no longer access my CCTV when I am not home. The same applies for my baby camera

My Reolink CCTV NVR is connected to my community fibre router. When I am at home and my phone is connected to the Community Fibre router, I am able to view my CCTV via the Reolink app.

However, if I am not connected to my home network (i.e. when connected to cellular data or another wifi network), I can no longer access my CCTV.

The baby camera has also stopped working - even if I am on the home network.

I contacted Community Fibre technical advisors today and this was their reply:

"""
we have received your request about the cctv system in your home, you were speaking to an agent about it and we have an update, unfortunately as you are on the 150 mbps package you do not have dynamic ip on your account as cgnat is enabled, you will need to upgrade to 1gb at least to have full cctv compatibility
kind regards
CFL
"""

I find it hard to believe that I need an package upgrade just to access my baby camera and CCTV.

Thanks guys
 
It’s true. You don’t need faster speeds. But community fibre enforce CGNAT on their lower speed plans. So if you don’t want to upgrade you would have to move to another ISP that doesn’t use this.

CGNAT causes problems with anything you self-host and try to access remotely via the internet. This technology requires you to have a unique IP address for it to function correctly, and with CGNAT you don’t have this and are instead sharing one address with multiple other users. Obviously with it being shared it has to block this kind of access in the name of security.

There’s potential ways around it like using IPv6 which will be a unique address but that requires your hardware to support it in the first place, and in my experience IPv6 can be a pain at times to the point where I’ve totally disabled it on my router.
 
In fairness you don't need to upgrade -- you might be able to use a service like Cloudflare Tunnel or ZeroTier (I use Cloudflare Tunnel and find it works well -- see their docs for how to get started). But there's also truth in what Community Fibre have told you -- there's a global shortage of IPv4 addresses and therefore Community Fibre only issue them to customers on faster packages, with slower packages behind CGNAT.
 
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Tailscale might be worth a look, you'd need something to run the client on at home though.

The baby monitor should work within your network, is it wired or wi-fi, maybe it needs it's wi-fi settings changed, also it's possible the router might need some wi-fi settings changed for compatibility (Assuming it's not wired)
 
Most consumers cctv devices set up their own port mapping/relay to an external server so CGNAT usually is not a problem. I have Reolink devices on a CGNAT connection and can access them remotely so it seems there's something else going on for you.

Mind you I use standalone reolink cameras and not an NVR so I don't know if the NVR relies on port forwarding (which would be affected by cgnat). Your baby monitor thing is a bit of a red herring as this will always work on the local network regardless, unless you were connected to a guest wifi that does client isolation or something.

[Edit] just had a quick look at my Reolink, go to network settings and enable UID , this sets up a relay which negates the need for port forwarding
 
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