You can get this error if you have a home router, home firewall or Internet gateway (hereinafter short for Router) that blocks VPN traffic. Less than 1% of our customers are affected by this problem. What you need to do is to configure your router to pass VPN traffic.

As there are many different brands on the market and all have slightly different settings, it is difficult to give a precise step-by-step instruction that works for everyone, but here is some general advice that will help you make sense of the problem.

Start to find the manual for your router (often available to download as a pdf from the manufacturer’s website). Find the instructions on how to surf to your router (usually by typing 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 in your browser), log in and find the right place to change the necessary settings.

What you should look for is the ability to open up traffic on the port 1723 used by the VPN tunnel. You should also try to turn on the possibility of allowing “GRE Protocol 47” used for “handshaking” with the VPN / PPTP. You can also search for phrases such as “PPTP pass through” or similar which may be another way to express the same thing. Search for “PPTP” in the manual to see if your router has other settings you may need to adjust to get the VPN working.

Some routers has no support for VPN. If you experience problems with the VPN, one option is to buy a new router. Some brands that we can recommend and which we know usually works without problems are Netgear and Zyxel. Avoid Linksys, Cisco and Dlink.

Some software firewalls can also block the VPN traffic, for example ZoneAlarm. If you’re experiencing trouble you may have to add connect.hidden24.co.uk to your “Trusted sites”. You may also need to set the software firewall to allow the VPN protocol get through. Generally, we recommend to uninstall the software firewall and instead use Windows built-in firewall that is simpler, better and that works with Hidden24.co.uk.