Google home and bt home hub break wifi

[Brucemcpherson]

I have a google home device I just brought back from US. When I connect it to wifi, it breaks the wifi for the entire house, and I have to reboot the home hub. I've seen a number of posts around describing the same problem with both the google home device and the Amazon echo. The suggestions for google home and along with a bt home hub 5 are to disable smart setup and disable 5mz wireless. Neither of those work. 

Has any anybody been able to connect a google home device to a network with a bt home hub 5 on it? What did you do?

[john46]

This link may help you https://community.bt.com/t5/Connected-Devices-Other/Android-box/td-p/1687037

[Brucemcpherson]

They are in different rooms. It's only when you try to connect the home to the wifi via the home app that it happens.

[john46]

Sorry cannot suggest any more as I do not know anything about the device have you checked on Goggles site to see if any one else has similar problems

[Brucemcpherson]

Yes .. it seems that everyone has the same problem with the BT home hub and google home combination, although it works out of the box with virgin media. It is the same issue with the amazon Alexa. The Alexa issue can be solved by assigning a static IP address and alternative dns servers apparently, but sadly the google home has no such configuration options. Essentially, whenever you try to connect to the wifi, the home hub goes off on a spiral of death and need to be restarted. Google home hasn't been released in U.K. Yet, but soon will be.

[Mehwishrubab]

could connect just fine on a Netgear 790S Aircard MiFi router.  This is a 2.4/5GHz WiFi 4G portable router.  In fact I varied the settings and the Google Home was perfectly happy on either 2.4 or 5GHz and varying just about all the settings and channels.  I had to set my phone to US as insisted by the Home app but I reverted to UK after setup and it still works fine.

I then picked up a cheap TP-Link VDSL2 router (only 2.4Ghz WiFi) just to try.  Connecting as originally via the LinkSys WiFi access point router I could not get it to work but at least the TP-Link VDSL2 router would not crash like the HH5 (I have little faith in the HH5 tbh, it's a rubbish bit of kit after all the Echo issues too!!).  The Google Home would also not connect the the WiFi from the TP-Link router which I tried most permutations of settings.

As I can't keep the Google Home on the Netgear 4G router as I want it to control my Hue and Google Cast devices I then dug out a TP-Link Nano access point.  This is a tiny matchbox sized 2.4Ghz access point with a RJ45 LAN connection.  I set this up as an access point, different SSID from my regular 2.4GHz SSID and stock settings, WPA2 etc.  I left the region setting to US as it's sole purpose was to link the Google Home to my LAN.  Well I was more than pleased when this worked just fine.

End result is the Google Home connected via 2.4GHz WiFi on the TP-Link Nano and other devices either wired LAN or my other 2.4 or 5GHz WiFi.  The Google Home works just fine and is controlling my Hue and happy to see me Chromecast device (wired LAN) and hand off requests to play YouTube videos to the TV.  

Now all Google need to do is finish the software so it understands the calendar properly!

I'd love to understand exactly why this works.  The Netgear 4G MiFi is probably a worldwide device but I did not explicitly choose a US region setting however it work.  The TP-Link AP was left on US region settings but I don't think the the main 2.4GHz channel frequencies are different in respect of 1-11 but maybe there is something subtle going on..

I copies the above from a person who has helped us on google home forum , coping his experiment 

[Brucemcpherson]

The Google Home forum discussion on this topic is here. There is also a comment from soneone here that he got it working with a bt home hub 6.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/googlehome/QBwTB5hs_wI/IFbmYHJSCQAJ

There is a theory that there's an OTA update available to workaeound this, but I havemt tried it yet. I turned my phone into a hotspot and the Google Home connected fine doing that, but of course it's external. 

I'll try again later and see if I can get the OTA update over the phone hotspot, and report back later.

[alexdiacre]

I gave my parents a Google Home for Christmas that was purchased in the US. Same issue as reported by others - it caused major issues with the BT Home Hub 5 router and caused the router to reboot. 

I resolved the issue by setting up my phone as a hotspot and connecting the Google Home to the hotspot to receive a firmware update.

The firmware update seemed to fix the issue. After the firmware update completed I did a factory reset on the Google Home device and then did setup again and this time it connected to the BT Home Hub 5 wifi.

If you are having issues I suggest you take this approach - do a firmware upgrade via another wifi network (my mobile hotspot from my Android phone worked well).