Hi everyone,
The current situation with COVID-19 means more people are working from home than ever before. We know our network is built to handle this increase during the day as even with the increase in home working, day time usage is not at the level seen on evenings in a normal week.
However, with this vast increase in home working it means some people will be using laptops and devices at home at a scale and for functions that may be far outside the norm. We know from operational feedback that we have received calls into the centres from customers frustrated at not being able to use their work laptop at home and this has sometimes been due to either a VPN (Virtual Private Network) needing to be set up or a request from a customer to Port Forward on their Hub.
The vast majority of modern VPN clients should work seamlessly with our hubs and the hubs are pre-configured with open ports to handle traffic and allow access to the internet. However some ports are closed and in order to run certain specified services such as mail servers, gaming servers, remote access via VPN you may need to open an extra port to allow traffic through. This is port forwarding and whilst it should rarely be required these days due to automated processes and interfaces, it’s possible that you will need to do this and therefore a ‘how-to’ guide is available at this link BT Home Hub port forwarding
Before setting up port forwarding you will need the port forward details i.e. you need to identify the port range as BT will not be able to provide this. Your first port of call for a VPN set up or port forward issue should be your own IT desk if you be using a work device. It is also worth noting that most corporates and businesses will be seeing usage on their VPN far above what they would likely have planned for and this could impact performance and stability of their VPN connection.
