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ZTE MC888 WAN IP address & port forwarding

After more hours on support chats and phonecalls, I called up Three Business to cancel my service. By chance, I happened to get a (UK-based) guy who used to work technical support for EE. He actually understood what I was asking and put out a message on his internal Teams group and the official answer from Three: their network does not support port forwarding and therefore private VPNs.

WTAF? Does anyone know if a 5G broadband provider in the UK that supports, you know, normal business-grade features?
I haven't followed this thread in great detail but I'm not convinced that it's Three that is preventing you from doing what you want to do. I have a Three Business SIM for my domestic Internet and have no trouble running Wireguard out to a couple of VPSs, nor reaching in to machines on my local network from those VPSs (eg with SSH) if I set up the appropriate forwards and/or firewall rules (and use 3internet APN to force a public IP). Router is ZTE MF286D running Openwrt.

HTH, Steve
 
I had a chat with Dax tonight and done a Teamview session with him. The ZTE was already in bridge mode but Dax had configured the USG firewall WAN with a private 192.168.1.x address so after changing to DHCP it successfully obtained a 188.x.x.x IP.

After checking the port forwarding rules on the USG were correct Dax then tried connecting to the 188 IP via Wireguard on his separately tethered PC/mobile (can't remember exactly which) but it still wasn't working. We then decided to go back to basics and test to see if the WAN IP is pingable so added a rule to the USG, tried pinging the WAN IP from my connection but still no go.

Dax had the idea to connect the ZTE directly to his PC so we could rule out the USG being at fault. After hooking it up and confirming the PC had been given a public IP with ipconfig, he then disabled Windows Firewall so we could try pinging the WAN IP (obviously you could/should add a rule to allow ping from WAN but turning it off was quicker for a temporary test). Pinging the WAN still didn't work.

So it does seem that although the ZTE is passing through a 'proper' IP (not a CGNAT IP), either Three aren't allowing inbound connections or the ZTE is blocking it somehow. My friend has a Three SIM with an MC801a and I've confirmed his port forward still works so I'm leaning more towards some ZTE oddity.

I explained that Tailscale is a good VPN tool to use for situations where port forwarding doesn't work and as it's based on Wireguard is very performant. I use it to connect to some Synology devices and appliances where port forwarding would be too troublesome to set up and being as it's free to use there isn't much to not like about it.

That being said I'm hopeful Dax is able to obtain another 5G router to test with, more for my own curiosity than anything else!
 
After more hours on support chats and phonecalls, I called up Three Business to cancel my service. By chance, I happened to get a (UK-based) guy who used to work technical support for EE. He actually understood what I was asking and put out a message on his internal Teams group and the official answer from Three: their network does not support port forwarding and therefore private VPNs.

WTAF? Does anyone know if a 5G broadband provider in the UK that supports, you know, normal business-grade features?
I can use port forwarding with Three and Ivacy VPN but it's not straightforward. If I want to simply allow an incoming request it is blocked, with or without the VPN. Further, the Ivacy Windows application also blocks port forwarding. The latter can be bypassed by setting up VPN connections manually with either SSTP or L2TP protocols.
When I run a torrent client it requests an open port. After a couple of minutes that is granted and incoming requests on that port are then allowed.
While the torrent is running I can do an independent check with e.g. https://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports/ and it shows the port as open. If I stop the torrent share the port is blocked.
I have no port forwarding rules set in my MC801A. It's at the default settings.

Therefore if there is some way to drive your remote application from an application based on your PC you might be able to get the port to open.
 
Recently a business I look after in central london suffered an OR mass service outage which took out both load balanced VDSL WAN links for the day. So I recommended trying the Three Business 5G Broadband supplied with the ZTE MC888. It was problem free for many years and never had a double outage but both went down within the last 3 months twice and FTTP isn’t available.

I also encountered the same issues, no WAN ping nor port forwarding worked in the default configuration on the ZTE MC888. As my router was already configured for dual WAN I knew it wasn’t a local configuration issue. I searched online and someone mentioned manually configuring the 3internet APN and this got port forwarding working in DMZ mode, however still no WAN ping. 60Mbps download & 2Mbps upload was achieved via speedtest as 4G+ only available at the moment which is good enough as VDSL achieved 70Mbps.

I finally tried switching to bridge mode which meant I could use the ddns client on my router (the ZTE ddns is broken and wouldn’t accept my password). My router WAN interface now has a dynamic public IPv4 address and everything works (SSH/HTTP port forwarding) except for WAN ping. Even VoIP is working however call quality isn’t perfect.

I used tcpdump on my router WAN interface and couldn’t see any ICMP traffic. So either blocked by Three or the ZTE MC888.

Software Version: BD_H3GUKMC888V1.0.0B02
Hardware Version: MC888HWV1.0.0
 
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