Need Mobile Broadband with Port Forwarding

networking wireless-networking router port-forwarding mobile-broadband

17,063

As above, mobile operators control NAT, users are clumped onto shared public IPs. You wont be able to forward it as you dont control the gateway server.

3G/4G isnt designed for these kinds of applications so it may not be possible to buy such a product.

What might work is a VPN. If you tunnel everything to a server with a public IP and forward all the traffic down the vpn to your host. Or just rent a server and admin it from your home.

17,063

Roger F. Gay

I'm an old guy who intentionally diversified experience. Although I've been everything up to VP in an entrepreneurial company that I helped start to Pres. of a company I started myself, project manager, marketing guy, sales guy, etc.; I started out as an engineer and it's still what's in my heart. My major passion is building the High Level Logic (HLL) software system, the seeds of which first appeared in my mind a quarter century ago. I'm currently working on a WebSocket Server as part of that system. Java / JavaScript are my primary tools.

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Roger F. Gay over 1 year

Need Mobile Broadband with Port Forwarding. Currently living in a place with no broadband connection, so I'm using mobile. I have a server running low traffic demonstrations. Would like a very reasonably priced (under $100) mobile wi-fi connection with support for port forwarding. Just now, the operators I'm dealing with seem to have too little knowledge of the importance of this feature and provide routers that don't support it. No help from their support people (who don't seem to have a clue). I'm not even sure whether they might have setups that cause routing to individual computers to fail. As I've been looking for a solution for a while, I can say that my experience is that companies selling routers seem to provide too little information about their products.

Is there a simple solution to this problem? Or, What buzz words or or acronyms should I look for when shopping for a mobile wi-fi router? Do you have a specific recommendation?
- James P about 10 years
  
  I'm not sure that what you want is possible using mobile broadband with any router. Unless you have some kind of special mobile broadband then you don't have your own IP address, you share the gateway IP address.
- Daniel B about 10 years
  
  Well, setting aside this is a world-wide site, you’re asking for a recommendation. This isn’t exactly on-topic. Also, it’s as @James said: Usually, you’re behind carrier-grade NAT.
- Roger F. Gay about 10 years
  
  Not sure what you're talking about. No matter how the mobile router is found to begin with, it does receive messages. It's then the router's job (once it has received the signal) to port forward to an individual computer, which has a local IP of course. Do you mean that the port number is used to get to the mobile router? And therefore is unavailable for anything else?
- Roger F. Gay about 10 years
  
  Also; the first router I bought from them; a little ZTE 16 Mbits/s (thought this situation would be temporary) supports port forwarding in the admin interface. Apparently ZTE thought it was technically possible to do it.
Roger F. Gay about 10 years

The first router I bought from my current operator; a little ZTE 16 Mbits/s (thought this situation would be temporary) supports port forwarding in the admin interface. Apparently ZTE thought it was technically possible to do it.
Linef4ult about 10 years

Oh, it totally is. But the forwards only make a difference if they assign you a routable IP. When you have a DSL or cable connection its 1 IP per connection(house, premises) which is typically shared between 2-10 people. In a large business the same is used for a lot more. But if every mobile phone was to get one there wouldnt be enough(that a big issue with IPv4), so carriers use 1 IP per x devices, could be 50 or 100. This is cost effective and stops people loading the network with heavy applications. Also 3G isnt "pinned up" so inbound requests might well fail. Why not a VPS offsite?
Roger F. Gay about 10 years

Well, now I'm trying to cram up on VPS. So far, several websites have told me it's one server pretending to be several servers. Doesn't exactly explain how I can use it as you describe. I'm signed up for DNS services, including a paid service with DynDNS (cheapest level). Is that what you mean?
Roger F. Gay about 10 years

Also confusing is the fact that the last mobile broadband router I bought (directly from a service provider) supported up to 20 devices simultaneously - strongly suggesting that the router is capable of finding individual machines. It's possible to run applications like Skype - which in the past I've had some port conflicts with, indicating the use of ports for applications.
Roger F. Gay about 10 years

Even on the little cheapy (16 Mbits / sec) that I'm still using right now, I have connected two computers and a cell phone simultaneously.
Roger F. Gay about 10 years

I note that DynDNS has something they call their Spring Server, which is VPS. So far, all I can find is their blogs about how great it was to get it up and running (like 2009) and how they look forward to using it ... blah, blah, blah.
Roger F. Gay about 10 years

Just in case you mean .... I've had a Yahoo Business account and am looking into another service that I can use to set up a few web pages. But I'm running Tomcat and a WebSocket server that I built myself. They won't let me run things like that without paying for a dedicated server -- mucho dinero.
Linef4ult about 10 years

When I said VPS I meant a virtual private server, aka a chunk of a dedi. Sounds like youd need a full dedi though. 3G/4G routers can still run a lan and allow access to multiple devices, its basically a subnet that then goes to one private IP from the ISP which then connects to the public. So outbound traffic can set up sessions and stuff fine, but inbound doesnt quite work the same.
Linef4ult about 10 years

To explain, take my mobile phone: Its external(Public) is is 178.XXX.XXX.XXX but its also assigned 10.192.140.244 as an internal. I could host a wifi AP from it and connect 5 laptops, and theyd get 192.168.1.2,192.168.1.3,192.168.1.4, 192.168.1.5. Say that last one .5 is a webserver, well to have that public youd need to forward :80 from the 178. to the 10. to the 192. Thats "double NAT" and its what makes it not possible.
Roger F. Gay about 10 years

Thanks for the explanation. I see the basic problem now. So, the VPN solution. Does that mean I could run something like OpenVPN on any computer that can be accessed publicly, have an established connection from my "mobile computer" (MC) (you know what I mean) that was initiated from the MC, and just pass requests through the VPN to MC? I've never used anything like OpenVPN. I'm just thinking about my own server - I built a gateway on the front that could pass requests / messages anywhere. Easy for WebSockets, which is why I built it ... studying to see how to pass http to another server.
Roger F. Gay about 10 years

Looked through some VPN set-up instructions at DynDNS. Says I need to port forward on my router. If you're still convinced that VPN can be the right way to go - I'll sink some time into learning more about it; at a deeper level perhaps.
Linef4ult about 10 years

When I mentioned VPN the suggestion was to use a pinned up connection somewhere else as a VPN host and then have your home machine dial into it, then fire HTTP traffic from the VPN server down to the vpn client in your house. TBH its probably unrealistic. Any way you could get this working is likely to cost more than a dedicated server which would be a better performer all around....I know you cant get fix line where you are but could you get fixed wireless? That would make a stable pinned up connection and youd have your own IP. Would make it all a LOT easier to do.