One more item to add to the list is CGNAT (Commercial Grade Natural Address Translation). ISPs are moving to this and it is preventing users from having an inbound connection. What happens is that the ISP has a Firewall/NAT Server of some sort which has a public facing IP. This is the IP that your node reports as your public IP. The problem is, your node has a different IP inside of this ISP network, which typically falls in the 25 subnet. I have four places that have switched over to this forcing me to switch to VPNs so that I can get past the CGNAT and get a live IP.
What are the IP addresses for the two routers? AllstarLink requires they both be public IPs.
Bob
K6ECM
It depends on how CGNAT is implemented. ASL will work for OUTBOUND originating linking as long as, end-to-end, the same IP is preserved to all nodes and the port mapping is preserved. This is how you can use an ASL node tethered to your phone through a mobile hotspot. You phone is already CGNAT’d for IPv4 and your phone introduces another NAT. But as long as everything is kept consistent it does work for all outbound-originated linking. Inbound, of course will never work.
However if CGNAT is regional dependent - i.e., the registration server sees a different IP than whatever node you want to connect to - then even outbound won’t work. Then you do need a VPN.
What we need to do is start moving ASL (and lots of other ham tech) towards IPv6. Lots of work for that though.
FYI- Verizon wireless (and probably many others implementing IPV4 CGNAT) do give you a true IPV6 address but block/do not allow any inbound connections.
This probably includes ALL if the 5G/4G cell providers that provide “home internet” service via their cell tower services.
For the most part, this is true. However, I know of two users of Verizon hotspots (critically here, not a phone) that actually gets a real public IPV4 address, and inbound connections work. One is using a corporate account of some sort as a backup internet connection to a fiber ISP, and we verified by literally ripping out the fiber cable, then waiting about 15 seconds and establishing a new connection to his Allstar node, that it does indeed work. The other one, I’m not so sure about.
Interestingly, where I am in central North Carolina, my parents’ fiber ISP, Lumos Communications, put everyone on CG-NAT a few months ago, and inbound connections to the remote base node I have here still worked for a while, until they didn’t one day after the connection was down for a few hours.
Apparently, you can call the ISP, and request to get a real public IP address again at no extra charge, but I haven’t done this yet.
If you have business service and their business gateway(router)(the big cube/box with four connectorized antennas) you are supposed to be able to put it into bridge mode and use your own router which gets a public IPV4 IP address.
I’ve not seen it work yet but their documentations claims it does.
They have simple online instructions that tell you to log in to their business router locally and put it into bridge mode (with screenshots).
I spent 3 full days with my customer onsite and Verizon business support 1 week ago and they could not make it work. When put into bridge mode ALL of the interfaces went dead (no ethernet link lights when connected) and you had to factory reset it to get back into “normal” mode and work again.
My customer finally gave up (Paid me for 3-full days of my time) and switch to a different non-wireless provider, which worked fine of course.
I can’t speak for home service routers ad I have never touched one of those yet.