Sony PS5 Avatar constantly displays "Appear Offline" with Home Hub 3

[juddster27]

My son had a PS4 for several years, played online games and had online chat parties with his friends, all with no problems.

He recently purchased a PS5 and although he can play online games and his wired connection is good, sometimes when he changes his Avatar in the top right hand corner of the PS5 and chooses to show himself as being Online, when he closes the drop down menu, the Avatar simply reverts back to having a dotted circle with a status of “Appear Offline” instead of the solid green “Online” symbol.

No matter how many times he pulls the menu down and chooses Online, the PS5 simply reverts to Appear Offline again.

This seems to be completely random, some days it is ok and some days it isn’t. We have been through a whole raft of the usual trouble shooting on the Playstation Network, e.g logging out and signing out, rebooting PS5, moving from a bad wireless connection to a much better wired connection, logging out of all devices via the Sony homepage etc, all to no avail.

Tonight he had the same issue, so I set up a hot spot data connection via his phone, connected his PS5 to the hot spot and bingo he could appear online.  He moved the PS5 back to the wired connection via our BT Home Hub 3 and he couldn’t appear online again.

So we rebooted the BT router & HH3 and hey presto he can sign in online on the PS5 again.

So my question is, is anyone aware of any problems with a PS5 and a HH3 combination?

This is the firmware version of my HH3, I don’t know if the HH3 devices are updateable or not.

Current firmware:           V100R001C01B036SP06_L_B        Last updated:    17/11/16

I need to do some more testing, but I obviously don’t want to have to keep rebooting my HH3 on a daily basis just to get his Avatar Online.  I moved from a normal BT Fibre package onto BT Halo 1 last year, but I was never offered an updated HH – don’t know if I should have been or not.

Any thoughts gladly accepted.

Thanks.

[imjolly]

The HH3 is now quite old and you must also be using an openreach modem to connect to the internet.  Halo 1 is just an add on to your broadband package and does not come with a new hub.  If you continually reset the modem and the HH3 that will have an adverse affect on your conenction with your speed dropping and noise margin increasing

if you continue to have hub problems and are still in fixed term contract then phone BT customer service on 150 and explain problem and get a new hub.  The new hub will do away with the modem and connect direct to the openreach master socket

[juddster27]

Imjolly, thank you for wading through my post so promptly, and for the warning about rebooting my modem\HH3 too often.  The following day we couldn’t get the Avatar to come online at all, so rebooting the router was not going to be a work around anyway.

I finally managed to find the uk playstation support email address (help@uk.playstation.com), emailed them and in the meantime did some scouring of the internet and came across articles like this:-

https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/2qo489/ok_rps4_lets_talk_mtu_max_transmission_unit_to/

https://www.dualshockers.com/ps4s-temporary-mtu-1473-fix-to-access-the-psn-made-official-by-sony/

After not working all day Saturday, immediately after changing the MTU value we were able to get the Avatar to change to online.  In fact we were then able to flawlessly switch between Online, Busy & Appear Offline.  Bit too early to say if that is a permanent fix, but it worked first time every time on Sunday and again today.

Sony emailed me back to suggest I should configure port forwarding on the HH3 for these ports:
TCP Ports: 80, 443, 5223, and 10070 to 10080
UDP Ports: 3478, 3479, 3658, and 10070
Sony made no mention about changing the MTU size.

From watching various YouTube videos I can see how I would set Port Forwarding up, but if I was to tell my HH3 to forward port 80 traffic to the IP of the PS5, what would happen to Port 80 traffic meant for his brothers PS4, for example?  I’m guessing I don’t completely understand the concept of Port Forwarding.

Thanks