New customer here. Hitting the same problems. At first I thought it was down to using an old version of Firefox, the ESR release, whereas another computer using the latest release didn't seem to hit it. But then I found it happened everywhere. I have the Three ZTE MC888A Hub.
I have a fairly easy way to recreate the problem so was hoping to add value to this thread. But I'm basically doing what @torz77 was doing back in September (Dates confused me, Why the American format?!) And I suspect @_duncan_ is even closer with the openssl command.
Had a very frustrating chat with support today, who are obviously useless but also seem unwilling to escalate an issue. I asked if there was a ticket system they can send me a link to so I could add the scripts I've written but they said no. So for a joined up conversation this forum seems to be as good as it gets.
I'm likely repeating a lot of this thread, but it's good to have a full problem summary so here I go....
Frequent errors in Firefox for PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR. Chrome affected too with a slightly different error. Affects some sites, but not all. Biggest site I've seen fail is Wikipedia, so I usually test with that. I simplified it to a curl command, which works on Window, Mac and Linux.
curl -sv https://www.wikipedia.org
It fails about 1 time in 4. Example errors are in pastebin for Windows, Mac and Linux. They show problems during TLS handshake. My initial searching suggested this is caused by a misconfigured Proxy. I don't have one, but I bet Three has many.
To make it easy to recreate the error I made scripts that run curl 100 times and print out stats of how many failures there were. Windows batch script here. Mac/Linux Bash script here. Run the script with a URL as the argument, eg
testUrl.sh https://www.wikipedia.org
Tests I have done with these scripts....
- Being connected to the hub over wifi has failures.
- Being connected to the hub over a cable has failures.
- Using my landline ISP, NowTV (really Sky Broadband) never fails.
- Tethering to my mobile phone and using Lebara (MVNO on Vodafone) never fails.
- Taking the Three SIM out of the Hub and putting it in my mobile phone and tethering as above has failures.
Windows, Mac OS and Linux all show failures failures connected to Three and no failures on NowTV and Lebara. - Tunnelling through Tor shows no failures (this was my simple VPN test, run the Tor Browser and then add curl argument "--socks5-hostname localhost:9150")
- HTTP sites always work - no surprise, the problem is TLS handshake and TLS isn't used in HTTP.
I think the above tests prove there's a problem with Three, and it's not a problem with the Hub. There's something in Three's network, perhaps something that handles 1/4 or 1/5 of the traffic in a particular direction that is misconfigured.
What's so horrifying is this thread is 15 months old, others have given the commands to recreate the problem and @JonathanB says
we haven't been able to reproduce the issue on our side
Well have my scripts. If you can't recreate from that, there's no hope of ever solving it.
Three has proven to me that mobile broadband is viable as home broadband. Much faster than my landline and the 5G is stable. But Three can't manage its network properly. I'm still in my 30 return period, so I need to decide soon if buying a VPN to put over the top of this, or jumping to a more expensive provider, or a cheaper SIM-only deal and adding the expense of buying my own hub.
