My work laptop hates my home network

[jurbie]

My work laptop really struggles on my home network with pages taking an age to load and often completely failing. Our IT people have had a look but, whilst they agree there is a problem, they can't seem to fathom it out. I don't have a problem with anything else on the network. Everything else, phones, personal laptops, desktop etc all work as expected. I've tried sitting it next to the router and I've also tried a wired connection.

If I tether to my phone it works fine, free hotel wifi? No problem. Visit the office, absolutely zips along so clearly it just dislikes my home set up so is there anything I should be looking at with my own set up?

I'm no expert on these things and simply have a standard Virgin router which does struggle to reach certain areas so there is a wifi extender plugged in upstairs.

[jimmyjimjim]

About 20 years ago I had a similar issue. All I can remember is that it was down to packet size, sorry.

[.:ian:.]

jimmyjimjim said:

About 20 years ago I had a similar issue. All I can remember is that it was down to packet size, sorry.

MTU can cause weird problems.
Basically if both ends of a connection have an MTU higher than something in-between can handle you get issues like some things working and others not.

https://www.comparitech.com/net-admin/determine-mt...

lol that's a really waffly article, try it on your work pc and your home pc.

Edited by .:ian:. on Thursday 7th March 07:31

Edited by .:ian:. on Thursday 7th March 07:33

[maccas99]

It's not your Wi-Fi or connection as you've tried both types so it has to be a setting on your work laptop.

I would be looking at your work laptop a bit more closely in terms of VPN such as zScaler or similar - there might be a setting in there that needs a tweak by your corp IT team.

[Mr Pointy]

Maybe a 2.4/5GHz issue?

[maccas99]

Mr Pointy said:

Maybe a 2.4/5GHz issue?

He said he's already tried a wired connection....

[Ydnaroo]

I suspect Virgin is your problem here. I know of someone having similar problems with their work laptop that's connected using VPN. Works reliably over any connection except Virgin. Problem seemed to start with recent Virgin upgrade and new modem. Their IT people say it's a problem they're seeing with other Virgin users. A Google for "virgin broadband and vpn problems" will reveal a fair few posts about such problems. Some NHS trust workers seem to have been having issues: https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Speed/My-work...

Edited by Ydnaroo on Thursday 7th March 13:18

[S6PNJ]

I potentially had a similar issue very recently. At some point in the past (last year), I could remote into my boiler using VNC Viewer and port forwarding. This stopped working at soime point (dunno when as I only use the facility infrequently). I called my ISP (Gigaclear) and they said back in Nov, they made a (global) network change and it was to do with CG-Nat. In order to get around this issue for me, they set me up with a static IP address and now I can once again, log in remotely to my boiler. At no point did any of my other remote access devices fail (Drayton Wiser heating, Linksys router, Synology webcam etc etc) but these apps all do remote access without me having to set anything up ass opposed to my boiler which I have to manually set up.

I discovered it as my router WAN IP address was different to that reported by websites (EG Nord VPN or GRC.com).

If you log into your router, you should be abel to see the WAN IP address, then either go to GRC.com or NordVPN.com and see what they are reporting as your WAN IP. If they are different, you might need to ask your work IT to do something (dunno what....).

[Ydnaroo]

S6PNJ said:

Good stuff...

I checked the connection I tried to help with and it was a public IP and not a CGNat IP. The connection was fine over a tethered mobile link which was CGNat.

[offspring86]

A few years ago I had an issue where my work laptop hated any WiFi network that was outside the office. Tried all sorts of settings, Service Desk spent many hours looking at it, with no success. The only thing that worked was plugging a usb wifi dongle into the laptop. To this day I've no idea what caused the issue.

[jurbie]

I suspect it probably is a Virgin issue. I have thought about doing the whole buying a new router and using the Virgin hub as a modem thing which seems to resolve a lot of issues.

I have however possibly resolved it by the simple and obvious action of turning the router on and off. I'll see if it lasts.

[Jinx]

jurbie said:

I suspect it probably is a Virgin issue. I have thought about doing the whole buying a new router and using the Virgin hub as a modem thing which seems to resolve a lot of issues.

I have however possibly resolved it by the simple and obvious action of turning the router on and off. I'll see if it lasts.

Do this - you won't regret it (I did this originally when I first got the super hub (before they had numbers)). Everytime they have provided an "upgrade" I have tried the new one only to end up putting it in modem mode are going back to my trusty R7800 Nighthawk (came out well before wifi 6 but does support MIMO).

[Steve_H80]

I did have a similar issue about 10 years back that was finally tracked down to the VPN our IT folks used, although I would expect any modern VPN to be problem free.