About notsosuresignal.com

The idea for notsosuresignal.com came about in a conversation during a frustrating third consecutive day of troubleshooting (following many before) trying to get a Vodafone Sure Signal device to work for a client after they had been without mobile coverage for over three weeks.

Having spent wasted a significant amount of time trying to get support from Vodafone helplines, forums and their twitter account it quickly became apparent that many other people were sharing our frustrations. With all of the notes and tidbits of information we’d collected over the course of the three weeks we decided to put a resource together that would help this community of frustrated Sure Signal users and hopefully keep their blood pressure in check by not hosting a forum then arbitrarily locking support threads down. The device itself is a fantastic idea but its roll-out and support has been nothing short of abysmal.

We’d love to hear from you if notsosuresignal.com has made a difference in diagnosing your Sure Signal connectivity issues or if you too have felt our pain and would now like to share the fruits of your solution-finding labour with the rest of the world – whether that’s getting a particular router to work, adding to our growing list of diagnostics pages or providing some more information around a recent outage.

- notsosuresignal.com

And just so you know we’re not making it up, here’s our whole drawn out story start to finish:

  1. Sure Signal arrived with our client and was plugged in to a 2wire router and BT Business Broadband connection – worked correctly
  2. Client migrated to a new datastream connection (2.5x the available bandwidth of BT) and a shiney new DrayTek Vigor 2710
  3. Sure Signal stops working, all other internet-based services working perfectly (including VoIP telephones). Troubleshooting begins (at this point just a flashing power light).
  4. Called Vodafone Sure Signal support (1st line) only to be told to replace the cable between the Sure Signal and the router. This after a 25 minute journey trip through a number of departments.
  5. Called Vodafone Sure Signal support back after the cable change making no difference (surprise, surprise). Informed that we should follow the port forwarding guide.
  6. Assigned the Sure Signal a static IP address using its MAC address, forwarded all ports and allowed connections from IP ranges described in the port forwarding guide
  7. Still not working, called Vodafone support back (2nd line this time – woohoo!) – informed that there was another port forwarding guide and to follow that instead
  8. Still not working, started delving in to logs – noticed a strange IP address appearing outside of the range provided by Vodafone
  9. Called Vodafone again (1st line… joy.) – informed that it didn’t matter what this IP address was, it was definitely an issue with the router or ISP (full marks for a partially correct answer here but not wholly convinced that the prognosis originated from an overflowing font of experienced wisdom)
  10. Thinking that since all other internet services were working correctly, it was unlikely that anything could be wrong with the ISP (error.) Sent DrayTek a message asking them if they had any advice.
  11. Can’t fault Harry from DrayTek – one speedy, helpful and detailed response. Oddly, other Sure Signal customers had contacted them with similar queries. Applied all suggested setting changes – allow ping from internet, allow fragmented UDP or ICMP packets, disable all IPSec VPN services, enable NAT IPSec passthrough
  12. Assured client that Harry had the answers and within 24 hours we would see the Sure Signal burst in to life
  13. Next morning – call from client to say there was no change. Started calculating the likely cost to support providers, router manufacturers and ISPs of Vodafone’s “plug and play” device on the drive to site…
  14. Contacted Harry again who noted “NAT sessions with port numbers listed as 0, this does not look right.”
  15. Completely out of ideas, called Vodafone support again – “Sounds like there’s an issue with the Sure Signal, we’ll send you a new one.” (Having spent a couple of weeks reading the forums by now, this seems to be a fairly common practice for some of the most trival issues and must be keeping a courier company in business – assume Vodafone will be paying pence per device)
  16. Several days later… Device arrives, client looks expectant, plug everything up, same result.
  17. Called ISP to check whether they blocked ports or types of traffic – told that they didn’t and that they actually had a Sure Signal in their office running on a LLU connection. However, rather than fob me off with excuses about it being the device’s fault they actually offered to help.
  18. Ran some local route traces, all checked out. Fired up Wire Shark and started comparing. The same IP kept appearing onsite – 135.245.1.1 which was completely unrouteable (resolves to portal.lucent.com – clues as why Vodafone might not know much about “their” infrastructure?)
  19. Called Vodafone, managed to get the name of third line support, promised a callback.
  20. Third line man calls back (Yes, there was only one person in third line and he helpfully informed us he was leaving, and had trained two people to succeed him. 100% improvement – congratulations Vodafone) – after running a path ping concludes the problem is likely to be routing issues BT had experienced earlier that day (this dispite the fact the trace clearly showed traffic routing via Global Crossing and not going anywhere near the BT network). Confirmed that Vodafone does use geo-location technology against connecting IP addresses.
  21. ISP offered to test the Sure Signal at their office if it was couriered over – off it went.
  22. Sure Signal arrives with ISP, is plugged up and works perfectly.
  23. Sure Signal arrives back with client, fails to work.
  24. ISP switches static IP allocated to client to an alternative range. Sure Signal restarted.
  25. Sure Signal springs in to life (and then performs lengthy software update)
  26. Leave client feeling as though progress had actually been made
  27. Receive call from client next morning saying Sure Signal is back to flashing power light
  28. Spend day running more Wire Shark traces and monitoring the Vodafone forum
  29. At 16.00 after a full day of diagnostics (and the client’s ISP switching IPs back and forth between ranges), Vodafone admit there is a problem with their infrastructure
  30. Restart device the following morning and it works.
  31. Sure Signal has been up and down like a yo-yo since installation with issues normally registered once every couple of weeks, which continue to cost us money
  32. Logged official complaint with Vodafone on 16th August 2010 after the threat of legal action from our client, still awaiting a response.
  33. Registered notsosuresignal.com 18th August 2010

NAT sessions with port numbers listed as 0, this does not look right.

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