Certain websites not loading (Google, YouTube) BtWifi with FON

[hrogers123]

Recently the BT Wi-fi with FON near my house has dropped connection. I was unable to connect at all for 24 hours and now the network has disappeared and changed name to just BT Wi-fi.

I have been able to reconnect but now certain websites do not load and produce a TIME OUT after around a minute of waiting. Specifically, Google and Youtube do NOT load and I am yet to test others but I know that others do work i.e. DuckDuckGo, Facebook, iPlayer, Netflix. Sometimes even the login page fails to finish loading properly but I have downloaded the BT app to help that issue.

I have tried multiple devices such as a laptop, android and apple phone and all fail to load properly. The connection has been working flawlessly for the past month and have only stumbled across this issue last night.

As a side note, I have been using a TP-Link Extender to help with signal strength which has been working perfectly until now.

[NigelB72]

Can you access it at all or is it just certain sites that don't work?

[NigelB72]

I've just been Googling this and it's possible that they've activated Parental Controls to restrict their children's usage during lockdown. 

[hrogers123]

The worst affected are Google (can't use the search engine) and YouTube (doesn't load the page fully and the video app doesn't work).

I use DuckDuckGo to search things now and other websites work perfectly fine, just seems to be Google sites.

As for the parental control idea I'm not sure why they'd activate it now as it's been working great for nearing 2 months now.

[NigelB72]

DuckDuckGo doesn't have all the trackers and runs through encrypted proxy servers I believe, so that's why that might be getting through

[NigelB72]

Parental Controls I believe allow you to block individual sites and apps so they darling might have been naughty and hasn't been doing their home work 😂

[hrogers123]

Could be 😂

My partner was just scrolling through Facebook and tried to load an article from the BournemouthEcho and that wouldn't load. Seems silly if they were to block that too so I'm really stumped as to what the issue is. I work in IT too so I'm frying my brain trying to get it sorted.

Thought it would be the TP Link Extender that had broken the connection, but I'm now connected to the BT Wi-Fi from the source and still have the issue.

Has BT Wi-Fi with FON been discontinued recently? It has literally disappeared from range and there's a notification prior to connecting saying;

Please Note: Our Network name (SSID) is changing to "BTWi-fi"

[NigelB72]

They've rebranded it to BT WiFi. I think it still runs on the Fon technology but Fon was a confusing for a lot of customers who thought they'd been hacked etc 

[hrogers123]

Well I assume they've changed some things as I've only had issues BT WiFi compared to FON, that worked flawlessly up until it disappeared.

[NigelB72]

BT WiFi (Fon) itself works flawlessly. I use it quite often and haven't had an issues so I'd imagine it's the Parental Controls