Suddenly http is very slow, Telegram can't connect, POP email times out

[#1]

I upgraded recently to faster fibre broadband and got a nice new hub2 router. Everything was great until Monday 21 Aug. Then it looked like DNS lookups were taking ages and timing out. Retrieving email via POP became sporadic, mostly timing out after taking ages to connect to mail.plus.net. Telegram cannot contact its servers. Overall, things are worse than the old days with 2MBS ADSL.

Plusnet customer services confirmed our broadband connection and router are OK but otherwise don't have any answers. We have multiple computers, multiple iPhones and iPads, multiple different browsers, all are having the same problem.

Currently, the service is almost unusable and has been for more than 2 days and nobody has any solutions.

Has anyone else had similar issues?  Any clues?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Did you sell/donate your old router to somebody else?

I've a suspicion there are two active connections assigned the same static IP address which would cause havoc with your Internet routing.

[#3]

I think you've cracked it!   Yes, I used our old router to bail out the people next door when their router failed.  The place is an AirBnB and the guests lost the internet, BT engineers came in and declared the router duff but tried our old router and it worked. 

I would never have guessed this, but I'll have to see if I can disconnect them until their new router arrives.

MANY THANKS!

[#4]

Good stuff. If they're Plusnet customers then I'll happily associate your old hub with their account if it helps in the interim?

[#5]

That would be great. Yes, they are plusnet customer. What info do you need?

We just verified your diagnosis. The guy next door (guest) just spent an hour on video conf, all OK while our router was unplugged. He has now turned that one off and I seem to have a good service from here.

[#6]

What info do you need?

He'll need the Plusnet accountname for next door ( he may be able to get it from the address? ) and the router serial number (printed on the back ).

Don't post them here, he'll ask for them by PM.

In the mean time , If you know their accountname & password then you can change the broadband username & password in the router to those and the problem will be temporarily resolved.

[#7]

Thanks @MisterW 

@greengenie - exactly this. If you can drop me a private message containing both yours and the neighbour's Plusnet account username (or address for the latter, if unknown) then I should be able to sort it.

Once I've done what I need to, the old hub will need factory resetting by inserting something into the reset pinhole at the back of the unit until the status LED flashes green.