Starhub internet SIM/connection problem

[JR8]

As mentioned in passing elsewhere, our M1 home fibre connection has been down since the weekend, and I don't seem to have been able to fix that. So meanwhile, rather out of desperation, I have reverted to a previous method of connection, a Starhub 'Maxmobile Prepaid Internet SIM' in a dongle. My thinking was that it's better than nothing.

As I understand I have paid for 5 days connectivity, and today is the final day. So yesterday I looked into how I could make on-line tops up, literally 'buying more time'... [ironic smile].

But I seem to be having a problem getting the relevant page to load. This is the page indicated in the SIMs accompany leaflet - 'To check balance and expiry: Log on to http://www.starhub.com/maxmobileprepaid/selfhelp and follow the on screen instructions accordingly.

That sounds simple enough, but the page looks like this:


And... well, it's not right is it? There's no colour, 'HTML' and so on. What appear intended to be buttons (?) seem to display the code 'under' the button. So right now, I can see no way of checking my balance, or topping up.

I'm using Win-7 on a desktop, the same as always. The screenshot is using Firefox as my browser. Opera is usually my default as it's light. For anything highly complex/secure or that might not like Opera etc, I use Firefox. I get the same resulting screen in IE and Chrome too, so I'm thinking it's not a browser issue at this point.

Does anyone have any clues as to what is going wrong here? Can anyone else correctly load the above page, and see it in some kind of functioning way?

Thx!

p.s. Jeez... this never ends I cannot see the embedded image in this post. Can anyone else?

[JR8]

Looks like I might have it resolved c/o my wife, over IM, from far far away!

To cut a long story very short, getting right to the final issue/remedy. The M1 fibre incoming cable, routes via a small Asus box w/flashing lights (cable router?). This then connects into the LAN1 socket of a second box, in the same incoming Comms cupboard. The 2nd box, from Huawei, has four LAN ports on it, but only 'LAN1' works.

So to cable my PC, and avoid the Starhub dongle, I had to remove the cable from the Asus box, into the Huawei LAN1 port, and put my PCs RJ45 network cable directly into there.

I doubt anyone will encounter this problem, but if there's a take-away from it, it not to assume a 4 port network router has more than port no.1 functional. Seems pretty inexplicable to me, but there we are...

[zzm9980]

Yes, I saw your post and was going to suggest something along these lines. The Huawei box is for your fiber, the asus is your router (shares the connection). I would suggest you power both off, power on the huawei, then the asus 1-2 minutes later. Make sure there are no red blinky lights (generally bad).

Sounds like your wife knows the Asus is flaky, and had you remove the asus from the mix and connect your computer directly to the fiber.

[JR8]

Yes, I saw your post and was going to suggest something along these lines. The Huawei box is for your fiber, the asus is your router (shares the connection). I would suggest you power both off, power on the huawei, then the asus 1-2 minutes later. Make sure there are no red blinky lights (generally bad).

Sounds like your wife knows the Asus is flaky, and had you remove the asus from the mix and connect your computer directly to the fiber.

Thanks Z, I'll consider this further. In fact I might just copy yr post to her 'FYI'. Right now I'm connected, and that's what matters today. I've lost wi-fi and the practicality of zero-cables in hall that come with using TP-Link connectors, but that's a 2ndary concern right now.

Thanks again!

[zzm9980]

If you're feeling adventurous, power the asus off and on, and plug it back in. Take a photo of the Huawei box and which cables are going where to your laptop so you can re-produce it. But the Asus should have "wan" or "internet" port in the back somewhere. Unplugging whatever is plugged into your laptop, and into that port on the asus should give Internet back to the Asus. Assuming all it needed was a power-cycle at least.

[JR8]

That's interesting, Mrs JR8 suggested something similar, but at that point I was p'd off and felt like I'd already tried every conceivable thing.

If I pluck up the confidence I'll give it a go tomorrow

Thx

[Brah]

Now that I have 2 routers, the power-cycle sequence gets a little more tricky, it took a couple of times to get it right with the modem, but exactly as Z mentioned.

[x9200]

Some hardware may need longer off time (even minutes) to get a full reset. I.e., this was the case for Motorola modems starhub used for its cable networks.

[zzm9980]

Now that I have 2 routers, the power-cycle sequence gets a little more tricky, it took a couple of times to get it right with the modem, but exactly as Z mentioned.

The trick is the device the fiber comes into needs to complete its power cycle before the router your devices connect to does. The reason being, that box passes an IP address to the router. The router will request it once its power-cycle is complete. While the router should be "smart" enough to keep requesting incase it didn't receive one (because the fiber modem wasn't done rebooting), many of the consumer ones don't.