Disabling OpenZone & FON

[Craggio]

Bit of a strange one,

We got infinity 13 days ago and have been experiencing wireless drop outs for the last 5-6 days, ive looked at the connection settings in the hub and it says its been connected for 5 days so its definatly the wireless thats playing up, its not just my laptop that loses the connection, 2 others do and trying to play CoD on the ps3 is a nightmare. all equipment still stays connected to the hub, just without internet connection for 1-2 mins.

Ive tried all of the channels and used the wifi channel software to select a free channel thats around my area, ive made all the equipments IP addresses static and still to no joy. all i can think of is that the bt OpenZone and FON, which is being emitted (correct me if im wrong) from the hub at the same time as the internet signal, is conflicting and causing the wireless connection to drop.

We didnt opt into FON or OpenZone but ive read that new customers are automatically opted into this service. is it worth opting out to see if this problem goes away or should i go down other routes so solve it?

Any help welcomed 🙂

[NanoTm]

you can switch the services off on your hub but hitting the factory reset button, and see if after redoing all your current settings things improve (a lot faster than trying to opt out of them) just dont click the option to setup fon on the front page after wards.

if that doesnt fix the problem then ask again and maybe some one will ofer a different idea:p

[Craggio]

Ive just checked the fault tracking and seen there have been a couple of faults:

StatusDate reportedDate completed    

Closed	09 Feb 2010	13 Feb 2010
Closed	20 Feb 2010	28 Feb 2010

if the faults have been completed ill see how things go over the next couple of days as it was only finished yesterday. if things dont improve ill look into resetting first then maybe opting out, Thanks 🙂

[ISP]

Hey NanoTm,

If you restore your Home Hub to factory settings, and you are a new Customer, you will opt back into FON or Openzone and vice versa if you are not a new Customer.

[NanoTm]

the whole point of my post was that if you were subscribed you cant just switch it off for good, without opting out of the service:(

and restoring it will remove the openzone/phone settings however on the service check later in the week it will reenable itself, so you can opt in to the service and not provide the hotspot yourself.

however the laptops wifi manager will alow him to block connections to it, either in the windows default one or any special adapter specifc ones (the vista version is so much easier to use mind you)

[fonmenot]

With regard to your wifi woes:-

In their infinite "wisdom" some technophobe at BT has decided that, apart from subjecting you to 2 networks you don't want or need, they will automatically put them on the same channel as your own network, creating interference between them and causing none of them to work properly.

Unfortunately, this affliction is common in the telecomms industry, where the "bright ideas" of the marketeers come before customer experience and little thought is given to practicality and effectiveness.

"automatic channel selection" is marginally better than the defaults of most routers (channels 1,6, and 11) . . . or at least it would be if it worked.  While few other channels were in use around me (verified using 2 network sniffers on separate PCs) it happily chose channel 6 (a bad idea at any time for the reason given above) when there was already another network present on that frequency and none at all on several channels including all of 2-5!! (ideally you want to be 2 channels away from any other network with high signal to noise ratio (SNR))

To then cause channel congestion by placing 3 separate networks on the same channel from the same router with the same signal strength is utter lunacy.

Congrats BT - another result from the ministry of **bleep** design!

[Alfshuman]

I've just come across this post and it resonates so clearly with the scenario I see time and time again. Whilst the home hub signal is strongest, my iPhone and iPad default to Fon or BTWIFi all the time when logging in some rooms in the house. I do want to disable them but what is the current advice about doing this without messing around with restoring factory settings which I don't want to do because I'm happy with everything else.

[pottyperson]

This recent thread raised the same problem but drew a blank. Don't know what else to suggest.