Hello,
Hopefully someone can help me with this.
I have a Vigor 2860ac router that has an existing (slow) ADSL connection on WAN1 where I had a number of ports configured to local LAN devices which could be accessed from external internet location, eg webserver and Remote desktops etc. The router IP is something like 192.168.1.254
I am in a rural location so I purchased a Huawei B618-22 4G router and outdoor antenna to use as my primary internet access device as the 4G signal here is giving me download speeds of 30+Mb/s compared to the 4Mb/s I had on the ADSL. I only use Huawei router as the 4G modem and don't use its wifi or LAN ports other than connecting it to the Draytek on its WAN2. This way I keep all my config & port settings etc I had on the Draytek and I still have the old WAN1 interface as a fallover.
This works well for all outgoing internet traffic, however I am struggling to get the incoming traffic to be able to reach the LAN devices on their specific ports. I am not sure if this is a limitation of the 4G SIM (designed for one device?) or my poor configuration of the Vigor/Huawei routers.
The Huawei router is connected to WAN2 on the Vigor. Huawei is set to DHCP and the Vigor gets an IP of something like 192.168.8.100. The only connected device the Huawei sees is the Vigor router although I have multiple devices connected to the Vigor LAN ports that can all access the internet. I use a dyndns service configured on the vigor and the huawei to set a hostname mapped to my internet facing IP address, this bit seems to all be correct and all worked correctly when I used the WAN1/ADSL interface.
Using the Huawei on WAN2 when I try and access a LAN device from outside my network nothing seems to be able to connect. I am not sure if there is further config to do on the Huawei or the Vigor to let this happen. I guess I could configure the Huawei as my main router but I would loose all the benefits of the load balancing and fallover of the Vigor.
can anyone advise?
Thanks

My guess, is that this is NAT issue...

If the Huawei is acting as a DHCP server, then it presumably must also be acting as a NAT router, for that 192.168.8.0/24 subnet. You need the Public IP address assigned by the 4G ISP to be presented to the Vigor2860, not a local, non-routeable one (like 192.168.8.100).

I'm not familiar with this Huawei Router, but google searches indicate that not all variants can be put into 'bridge mode', which is what you need. (The other issue, is that you may not actually be receiving a public IP address from the 4G ISP - many of them seem to use CGNAT, unless you pay them extra £.)

Thanks for the reply. I checked and my provider (EE) does indeed use Carrier Grade NAT on their 4G sim deals so that probably puts a stop to it unless there is some 3rd party solution. There is no other provider here either with a good 4G signal so I am stuck with EE. I should have checked beforehand but I wasn't aware of the CGNAT limitation.

The internet facing IP I get (from whats my ip) from any device on my LAN is 213.205.xxx.xxx but on the Huawei router under its Device info menu the 'WAN IP' is 10.6.xxx.xxx. I presume this is my unique IP address to identify me to EE, but the 213.205.xxx.xxx net facing IP is a shared one as I now understand better how the CGNAT shares the IP with other users.

At the very least I do have a massive improvement in download speed which was my main priority, it could probably have been achieved with less expense as the B618 is probably overkill. FTTP is planned for my location but I just saw in the press yesterday its being delayed even further due to some legal wrangles so this is my best option for now.

I will try to configure the Vigor to use the IP of my ADSL on WAN1 for 'incoming' connections to my servers and utilise the WAN2 for the majority of downloading tasks which I think should be possible.

psychospiller wrote:
I checked and my provider (EE) does indeed use Carrier Grade NAT on their 4G sim deals so that probably puts a stop to it unless there is some 3rd party solution.

The work-arounds all seem to involve having access to an external service with a public IP address, that can forward traffic to you. The public end could be a cloud service, or rented server (or virtual server), accessed by an outbound VPN connection. I believe some of the VPN providers also provide this functionality, as an intrinsic part of their offering - but I couldn't quickly locate a specific one.

There's also ngrok , which uses a program running on one of your local machines, connected to their server. No doubt there are others, but I've no personal experience of any of them...

He also wrote: There is no other provider here either with a good 4G signal so I am stuck with EE. I should have checked beforehand but I wasn't aware of the CGNAT limitation.

Having recently moved from the Greater Manchester metropolis, to rural North Devon, I feel your pain

Every time my other-half found a likely looking property on Rightmove.co.uk , I headed over to the OFCOM site and invariably reported back that it was non-starter because of Internet speed The place we ended up, can manage 50 Mbps - which would have been impressive in 2004 but I don't know how they have the nerve to continue to call it 'Broadband' :?