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BT whole home premium backhaul - has it been fixed, if not whats the alternatives

booclay — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 17:14:03 GMT

We have BT whole home premium which hasn't been great to be honest. I've purchased 6 discs to try to get good wifi around my home, and it's only just about coping (5 bed house). So I've daisy chained a few of them together to get better signal. My understanding is that you can only daisy chain them and can't simply plug all the extenders into a switch like you can with the non premium version? (seems crazy to me).

I wondered if they were looking to patch this in a firmware so you don't need to daisy chain them? But if this is not possible, can anyone recommend a wifi extender/router that I could simply plug into a switch on my LAN and it work?

To elaborate on this. I have the daisy chained BT premium disks spreading across my house, but I also have an ethernet cable going to my garage. The ethernet cable coming from my garage is nowhere near the last disc in the daisy chain so can't add another home premium disc. Can I just add a non BT disc wifi router into my garage and then plug that into the network? Though won't this mean that I'm double NAT? If it is possible to do this, does anyone have any recommendations on what wifi extender/router I should get?

Many thanks in advance

Re: BT whole home premium backhaul - has it been fixed, if not whats the alternatives

naylor2006 — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 21:39:13 GMT

You cant connect the premium discs direct to ethernet? Thats crazy, surely thats not true, I use Wholehome, the original ones and have 8 discs, 4 of which are on ethernet, soon to be 6 🙂 I love that you can do that.

If you're usingPremium Whole Home Wi-Fi, you can't. Only your first disc can be connected to the hub (router) using an Ethernet cable. If you wish to connect more discs by Ethernet, you'll need to connect them to the Ethernet port on another disc. You can also use the Ethernet ports on these discs for devices such as TVs and printers.

Omg thats mental.....so you have to connect the disks to each other to give them a hard line back to the router in a daisy chain method. Thats really limiting....

Right what you want is not a WIFI Router or any kind of router, you just need a WIFI Access Point, Routers typically want to route internet traffic and have DHCP servers in them and you dont want two of those on your network unless you know what you are doing. Thats it from a basic point of view.

If you do get a WIFI Router you would need to switch off all the routing side of it just leaving it in WIFI only mode, plenty of WIFI Routers these days have this, so all you do is just plumb in an ethernet link back to your router then configure the WIFI network on the new device, 'Garage WIFI' or whatever. I mean you can technically just give it the same SSID and Password as your BT Wholehome if you want so you dont need to worry about dual WIFI networks.

Depends on how much money you want to spend but if you look for WIFI Access Point and not WIFI Router you should find some options, if youre quite new to home networking in general just look for the one that has the easiest setup.

Re: BT whole home premium backhaul - has it been fixed, if not whats the alternatives

booclay — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 22:36:49 GMT

Amazing reply. Thank you.

Yeah it is super weird that you can't just plug them all into a switch and them work like the regular whole home.

If I had known that the "premium" version was inferior. I would have never paid extra for it.

That is super useful information On getting an access point. I'll look into this.

Thabks again for your help 🙂

Re: BT whole home premium backhaul - has it been fixed, if not whats the alternatives

naylor2006 — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 22:44:06 GMT

No problem.

Im glad I didn’t go premium, being able to just plumb in Ethernet overtime when I’ve been able to run it has been great.

It’s probably possible tonight with the premium if you used VLAN on its own subnet, if you isolated the disks so they were the only items on a particular LAN then having them all connect to a switch on that subnet might work.

Have you ever tried just connecting multiple ones to the router? Just wondering what actually happens?

Re: BT whole home premium backhaul - has it been fixed, if not whats the alternatives

Les-Gibson — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 22:45:27 GMT

Any Wireless Acess Point will do, the simplest method would be to connect a Wi-Fi repeater with Access Point Mode (e.g. the Netgear EX6000) to your Ethernet cable, the cheapest method would be to re-purpose an old hub or router.

The details for using an old hub/router have been discussed in great detail on this forum.

1. Give the router to be re-purposed a static IP address, say 192.168.1.2

2. Turn off the DHCP server, it can cause complications if you don't

3. Connect the two hubs together LAN port to LAN port using the Ethernet cable

4. Connect your devices to the Wi-Fi SSID of the re-purposed router

Re: BT whole home premium backhaul - has it been fixed, if not whats the alternatives

booclay — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 22:57:18 GMT

I think I tried it once, but I think it caused problems. Can't fully remember, but then saw on this forum that you can only daisy chan them and then built my network around doing that, well as best I can.

It's annoying because I would have just got a different, and better mesh wifi, but the BT router only works with the BT mesh system. Or so I read.

Just a bit of a mess really

Re: BT whole home premium backhaul - has it been fixed, if not whats the alternatives

booclay — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 23:06:39 GMT

Just had a quick look for the Netgear EX6000. I think its discontinued. Is there an alternative? Not too worried about the cost (within reason). Just want a good one, that works :-). Cheers

Re: BT whole home premium backhaul - has it been fixed, if not whats the alternatives

Les-Gibson — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 13:03:59 GMT

Forum rules forbid me from posting commercial links, however they do not forbid me from mentioning Amazon or Ubcwin. The one I'm looking at comes in black at £25.98 and in white at £26.99.

It looks remarkably like this, AP mode simply means you connect it to your router via the ethernet cable that you already have in place

Re: BT whole home premium backhaul - has it been fixed, if not whats the alternatives

booclay — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 13:30:32 GMT

You are a super star, thank you