Erratic Broadband

[bk071]

I have been a Fibre 2 customer for a few months now and have experienced very mixed performance throughout.

The main router is placed in the living room and extender disk in upstairs hallway.  At times everything is great and as expected, however more often that not, the WIFI signal appears to fluctuate between extremes so I started to take measurements over a few days in different locations throughout my house.  I used two different apps, one from the magazine which, I have only reported one of the app values here as they are mostly similar to each other - values are (latency/download/upload):

Living Room (within direct sight and 3-4  feet of the main router):

11th May : 06:34 (19/8.5/7), 08:30 (16/15.1/6.7), 13:00 (17/5.8/5.7), 13:02 (16/54/12.7), 16:30 (18/1.2/1.8), 20:30 (21/2.4/4.1)

12th May: 06:40 (14/55.7/12), 12:20 (21/1.6/2.5)

13th May: 06:45 (15/53.5/11.3), 12:10 (15/53.4/10.6), 13:00 (15/54.1/11.8), 18:05 (97/0.7/0.4), 18:10 (16/53.8/11.4), 18:15 (15/54.2/11.8)

Upstair bedroom office (within 3-4 feet of extender disk):

11th May : 06:30 (19/13.5/7.4), 13:00 (19/2.5/4.1), 16:30 (20/4.6/3.3), 20:30 (17/5/4.8)

12th May: 06:40 (17/6.8/5.2), 12:20 (15/53.7/11.3), 12:25 (18/4.4/2.1), 12:27 (21/0.5/1.8)

13th May: 06:45 (15/50/8.9), 13:00 (18/4.7/3.4), 18:00 (33/0.3/0.5)

14th May: 17:30 (67/0.9/0.5)

This level of fluctuation is not acceptable given the service I am supposed to receive.  Early on and during the day I am the only one in the house and later on my kids are in and they may be on their xbox's and phones, but this should not result in the upstairs WIFI signal collapsing to a such a poor level, such as the measurement ~ 30 mins ago.

I have at times received a spot on service (which seems to coincide with when I make a complaint ), but in the last few weeks this has becomes worse and worse.   It gets so bad that sometimes my son uses his mobile phone as a hotspot or to watch videos rather than using our WIFI....Very much appreciate if there are any suggestions / ideas on how to improve this situation. 

[imjolly]

So you are not having a problem with your internet connection and the problem is your wireless reception in your home.  There is no guarantee on WiFi speed as that is susceptible to interference within your home and every home is different.

Have you tried manually selecting the wireless channels by using a WiFi analyser on your phone and selecting a free or less congested channel and see if that helps your connection.

Did you turn off smart setup in the hub manager?

[bk071]

Hi, thanks for your help.  Ok perhaps I am adding 2+2 and getting 5 by jumping to conclusions.  I just wonder why my WIFI is so erratic in the same room as the main router is located - what could be interfering within  3-4 feet distance?

I don't tend to meddle with the router settings as this has never been my strong point.  Smart setup is still turned on and I have never changed any of the default channel settings.  Is there a better WIFI analyser tool that will help identify a better config.

I also had not realised that the extender disc is not dual band (I can't see the point of that, although I can imagine it is cheaper).  I deliberately  set up my main desktop PC to choose 5GHz signal by default, which then by-passes the disk and goes straight to the main router.  This works up to a point but for some reason, it seems  to drop out back to 2.4GHz.  I then have to manually reset it again on my PC...which is a little annoying

I am happy to play with settings and try new things out, if there is some logic that can be applied and tested systematically?

[imjolly]

If you read the forum you will see many people recommend turning of smart setup due the problems it causes.

Turn Off smart setup

There is a WiFi analyser available in Windows 10 apps which you can use