Question Am I doing port forwarding/networking right

[allthegearnoidea]

I have recently had two rooms built in our attic and now our home is spread out over a wider area, the wifi on our router just wasn't cutting it. So I decided to cable as many things as I could (17) so bought a TP-link TL-SG1024DE switch and for the things I couldn't I bought two TP-link Deco S4's.

My router (Virgin Media Hub 3) is in modem mode, I have the main Deco S4 plugged into the single socket on the router that works and the network switch is plugged into to other Deco socket. Everything seems to work, I'm not getting double NAT anywhere.

When I download anything on my desktop PC, I regularly downloaded stuff before at 15-20 MB/s (Broadband speed is 500mbps) and other people could quite happily use the internet simultaneously but since changing the way the network is, anything I download is very unstable, it goes up to 5MB/s and then plummets to 65Kb/s and is up and down like a yo-yo. The internet then practically drops out on all other devices. I've tried port forwarding, but I am a total novice at this stuff and it is not working. I'm becoming so frustrated with it not working.

I have tried using portchecker.co and it seems that every port possible is closed.

Is there any help anybody can offer? I may well have done something wrong, but I have no idea what!

 

[bill001g]

Your average home user want no port forwarding set. That is partially why the default is no rules set.

Port forwarding really only matters if you are running some kind of server or you needed say remote access to something on your lan.

Every other application the router will allow traffic to return to the internal device based on the ports that are being used. So as long as the internal device is the one controlling the traffic all will work fine.

Hard to say what your problem is. Something strange with the deco units. Since you are not actually using the wifi repeater function you could have actually saved yourself some money and just purchased a inexpensive router and ran it as a AP.

So what I would first since the ISP router seemed to work ok is to change it back to router mode. Now remove the deco you have plugged into the router and plug the switch into the ISP router. Everything should now again work but I assume you have the second deco to improve wifi converge.
I would look though the manual and find out how to set it to run in AP mode. A AP is kinda like a small switch with wifi radios. All the router functions are disabled.

The actual "MESH" stuff is all marketing. Everything always is one network. It might be a little easier to setup for people that don't want to bother keying a SSID and password but other than that you are paying lots of money for a repeater. Very high end mesh units have extra radio chips for when you need a wifi backhaul to the main router. In your case where you have a wire for the backhaul it will always be better than a extra wifi hop.

 

[allthegearnoidea]

Your average home user want no port forwarding set. That is partially why the default is no rules set.

Port forwarding really only matters if you are running some kind of server or you needed say remote access to something on your lan.

Every other application the router will allow traffic to return to the internal device based on the ports that are being used. So as long as the internal device is the one controlling the traffic all will work fine.

Hard to say what your problem is. Something strange with the deco units. Since you are not actually using the wifi repeater function you could have actually saved yourself some money and just purchased a inexpensive router and ran it as a AP.

So what I would first since the ISP router seemed to work ok is to change it back to router mode. Now remove the deco you have plugged into the router and plug the switch into the ISP router. Everything should now again work but I assume you have the second deco to improve wifi converge.
I would look though the manual and find out how to set it to run in AP mode. A AP is kinda like a small switch with wifi radios. All the router functions are disabled.

The actual "MESH" stuff is all marketing. Everything always is one network. It might be a little easier to setup for people that don't want to bother keying a SSID and password but other than that you are paying lots of money for a repeater. Very high end mesh units have extra radio chips for when you need a wifi backhaul to the main router. In your case where you have a wire for the backhaul it will always be better than a extra wifi hop.

Thanks Bill.

I will give that a go an be sure to let you know how that goes! I did think about changing it from modem>Deco>switch to modem>switch>deco but I did not know about different modes on the deco. I have now found AP and will give that a go!

Thanks again for your help!

Dave.

 

[gggplaya]

If the Virgin hub was not in bridge mode and your deco was not in AP mode, then you are double Nat'd.

You shouldn't need to port forward anything.