5G hub (Greenpacket Y5-210MU) dropping wired connection after a few days every few minutes

JohnR · 3 weeks ago

First, it seems I'm not alone: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/talk/threads/drop-out-problems-with-new-three-outdoor-hub-y5-210mu.42890...

tl;dr - I've only had the Three 5G broadband package for 1 week. I didn't alter the 5G outdoor hub configuration, which is running firmware 130.00100.113.024. After 6 days of flawless operations with minimum 300/20 Mbps downlink/uplink, the 5G outdoor hub started closing the ethernet connection intermittently every few minutes, and the only fix (so far) is a reboot of the hub. I'm willing to help the Three engineers debug this (I have networking experience), but if it can't be properly fixed (firmware update?) or if they aren't interested, then I'll have to cancel the contract as this is a deal breaker.

Details:

The outdoor hub (Greenpacket Y5-210MU) seems to intermittently close the ethernet connection. I've debugged this several ways: with a laptop directly connected to the hub via the PoE, via the eero, via its own web GUI (192.168.0.1).

I've only had it for 1 week. Worked fine for 6 days. Then last night I noticed intermmittent dropouts. Pinging google.com continuously revealed the dropouts last 30-60 seconds, and happen every few minutes, from 5 to 10, but especially if there is any network activity from some connected client (phone, laptop, etc).

I used several methods to discover this:

the web gui's advanced > system > ping (which pings directly from the hub, independently of any connected router/eero/device); this always works fine, so I know the 5G connection is working
a laptop connected directly to the hub; when it happens the laptop OS reports ethernet disconnected
the supplied eero 6 router; when it happens, the eero's led turns red, and the eero app says "Internet Offline, Wired Connection Not connected".
The syslog logs don't show anything suspect, which to me suggests a memory leak of a process running on the hub (syslog logs downloaded from web GUI > advanced > system > maintenance > syslog > download)

I waited for almost 24h, during which it lept happening continuously, then I rebooted the Greenpacket outdoor hub and voila ... came back to normal.

From experience with modems and routers, this is a symptom of a memory leak of a process that runs on the Greenpacket hub, which builds up over time until it fills the entire memory, and then all services get affected, causing interruptions everywhere.

Are there others experiencing this?

Are there any Three employees here willing to help with this?

RichGee · Monday

Same issue here, Installed mine last Thursday and it's been flawless. Got home today at 5pm and it's gone down twice, needing the 5G hub rebooted to fix.

Really disappointed as I've been getting great upload and download speeds, looks like I'm going to have to cancel and stick with Virgin Media.

JohnR · Monday

I did some more looking around. The hub generates almost 6MB/hour of syslog data (thats just syslog). 25MB for only the last two log files covering a mere 4h or so. That's immense. Looking inside, it seems everything is at ultra verbose level, including even the original C language source name that was compiled, e.g.

Mon May 12 20:46:23 2025 user.err : 9746:[src/at_parse.c,at_parse_response,207]at_parse_response in +EDMFAPP:6,9,"NR PCC RX1",-115,6,-85,-255,-255,1,4,-119,str_len=46

The firmware seems like it needs a much better configuration because this is way too excessive and could be the cause of system hangs and other problems.

If the logs are trimmed and truncated to the last few hours then thet would not be very useful to debug problems happening over longer periods of time.

Someone should really look at this.

I also replaced the PoE injector with a high quality one with an integrated high efficiency switching power supply, because the one provided really doesn't look very reliable, a no-name device that feels really cheap. Voltage in PoE needs to be very clean as it's added on top of the data signal and can perturb it ... which may explain the link problem I described in the first post of this thread.

I also disabled the scheduled reboot every 7 days. Why is that enabled by default? If the device must be rebooted every 7 days for it to work and me to lose connection and have interruptions every 7 days, then it's not a reliable product and i don't want it. Three should NOT be selling it like this with this periodic reboot enabled by default. It reflects badly on you.

I also disabled ipv6 on the WAN 5G connection (in Mobile Network > APN > options).

I will continue to monitor the behavior.

JohnR · yesterday

Oh, in addition to my post above, I discovered that the same behaviour (Ethernet link being dropped intermittently) exists when there is a bug in the EEE feature implementation (EEE = Energy Efficient Ethernet, a feature now part of the 802.3 Ethernet standard) of some Ethernet devices/routers/switches. The fix is to disable EEE on at least one of the two connected devices on the same cable. For example see: https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/issues/17351

The Three engineers and/or the Greenpacket engineers (manufacturer of the outdoor hub) may want to add an option in the GUI to disable EEE, since the EEE implementation may be buggy in either the outdoor hub or the router connected to it on the PoE.

p.s. I am now using my own router (instead of Eero) connected to the outdoor hub, and can disable EEE on that. I haven't disabled it yet in order to see if my changes above address the issue. Will disable EEE if the issue appears again. Others reading this may want to try disabling EEE if they connect a different device to the outdoor hub instead of the Eero (either a different router or directly a laptop/pc).

DaedalusEH · Thursday

Same issue here. A week after I activated the account, I started having internet disconnections every single hour for a couple of minutes each time, weirdly the disconnection times where timed perfectly (eg 21:00 then 22:00 ... ). The disconnections persisted for a week. I still have the occasional disconnections now which are annoying but not as annoying as before.

MymsMan · 2 weeks ago

I have had the outdoor hub and eero router for almost a month now and hadn't noticed droputs until yesterday evening when I had several 😥

While the eero app reported "Internet Offline, Wired Connection Not connected" the eero event log does not show any LED change events for yesterday which is a pity because I was hoping to be able to report more accurately how frequently dropout were occuring. The eero events do show quite a number of unexpecte Led change event for other days. Unfortunately AFAIK eero dont allow the event logs to be downloaded which seems to be a major deficiency.

I know I can download the hub logs but I don't know what I should be looking for.

Are there any messages that indicate when an ethernet or internet connection has been established/dropped by the hub.

I did noticed during one outage I could still connect to the hub web page and the 5G signal strength was better than usual, 84 vs 74-76 normally. This would seem to indicate an issue with the hub connecting to the internet rather than with the ethernet connection between hub and eero.

JohnR · Saturday

If you could connect to the hub during an outage then it wasn't an outage (or at the very least the hub didn't drop the Ethernet link, else you wouldn't have been able to connect to it)

Right now I'm testing an aftermarket PoE injector - a more expressive and higher quality injector than the cheap Chinese one provided by Three.

MymsMan · Saturday

@JohnR wrote:
If you could connect to the hub during an outage then it wasn't an outage (or at the very least the hub didn't drop the Ethernet link, else you wouldn't have been able to connect to it)
Right now I'm testing an aftermarket PoE injector - a more expressive and higher quality injector than the cheap Chinese one provided by Three.

I agree, I don't think I have been suffering from the problem described in the OP, instead my outages were caused by a period of terrible latency. I have now installed PRTG and being tracking ping response times - normally I get ping responses of around 25ms but at 5pm on May 8 the hub picked up a new WAN address and ping times went through the roof, Other sympoms were the same as my previous post, The eero event log shows numerous Led light changes during the period, When I reset the hub in the morning another WAN address was assigned and normal service resumed.

MymsMan · 2 weeks ago

I extracted the LED light chage events from the eero* and there are several unexplained 1 minute outages when I wasn't doing anything with network, but not at the tmes when I noticed problems connecting to internet

eero—Apr 27, 4:33   am 
Living room eero 6 system LED changed to solid white (online) 

eero—Apr 27, 4:32   am 
Living room eero 6 system LED changed to solid red (offline) 

eero—Apr 25,1:19  pm 
Living room eero 6 system LED changed to solid white (online) 

eero-Apr 23, 8:01   am 
Living room eero 6 system LED changed to solid white (online) 

eero—Apr 23, 8:00 am 
Living room eero 6 system LED changed to solid red (offline) 

eero—Apr 22,1:57 am 
Living room eero 6 system LED changed to solid white (online) 

eero—Apr 22,1:56 am 
Living room eero 6 system LED changed to solid red (offline) 

eero—Apr 20,  4:22   am 
Living room eero 6 system LED changed to solid white (online) 

eero—Apr 20,  4:21  am 
Living room eero 6 system LED changed to solid red (offline)

* extracting logs is a real PITA, filter events for word LED, screen capture each screen, OCR images, save text to file, edit to clean up

JonathanB · 2 weeks ago

Hi @JohnR,

I've sent you a PM to confirm a bit more info for our investigation. Please get back to me when you have some time.

To view your private messages on the community, click on your avatar image in the top right of any community page, then "Messages".

Thanks,
Jonathan

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