Introducing Whole Home Wi-Fi

[SeanD]

Internet from the loft to the cellar. And in every room between.

Staying glued to that box set season finale from living room to bath. Video calling your family on the other side of the world. Changing a fuse, with a YouTube tutorial guiding the way beside you. Sifting through boxes of memories in the loft, to the soundtrack of your teens.

Wherever you are in your home, Whole Home Wi-Fi puts what matters most at your fingertips. It brings super-fast, super-reliable Internet to every room. It talks to all your gadgets to make sure they're always connected to the fastest and strongest signal. And it's bristling with brilliant controls that put you in charge of a supercharged home network.

Read all about this exciting new product from BT from here, BT Whole Home Wi-Fi

If you have any questions please see here for more help, BT Whole Home Wi-Fi FAQs 

To download the Whole Home Wi-Fi app please see here, How can I download the Whole Home Wi-Fi app?

Cheers

Sean

[leelee1]

I thought that was smart hub 6 was supposed to be able to do that LOL So even Bt are saying
hub 6 is not up to the job?

[john46]

Please do not forget it is not just for the hu6 it is for all earlier versions of the home hub as well as third party routers and other providers as well

[prinknash]

True - although I suspect that most people using third party routers would be unlikely to want to supplement them with a BT product. And early reports of this one aren't entirely encouraging. 

P

[seymour999]

How are people getting on with this? I've had three occasions over Xmas where it seems to have had problems and affected my BT Smart Hub. Solid orange light, need the hub to be restarted. Anyone else has this?

[smf22]

See this post for some views. https://community.bt.com/t5/Connected-Devices-Other/Smart-Hub-amp-Whole-Home-WiFi/td-p/1697838

Regards

[WilfH]

Posts elsewhere suggest that the Whole Home wifi product relies on Mesh technology as used by SkyQ.

If you take a look at the SkyQ forums that isn't working out terribly well for them so perhaps it's not surprising that BT are having a hard time making this work well in real world installations rather than controlled test environments.

I don't believe any of these solutions are for the faint of heart or those without some networking skills and a basic understanding of the limitations of wireless technology. Sadly. Support staff who rely on a scripted flow-chart question and answer setup to help us are very ill equipped to support products like this and we the customer are to all intents and purposes on our own.

[brummygit]

I've bought Whole Home WiFi in recent days and can only give limited experience at the moment.

To set up was very easy - connect the first disc by ethernet to the router (not a BT Hub in my case, but I plan to return to my BT Smart Hub now I'm not relying on it for WiFi) and power it up. Connect your phone to the new wifi network using the detais on the back of the disc. Then power up each disc in its location and add it to the network - either using the smartphone app or web browser. That's really it - it just works.

Once up and running you ideally want to disable your router's WiFi as it will only cause interference - you don't use it with the whole home wifi which creates a new network. You may also want to change the admin password and SSID/WPA key but these are optional.

It does use mesh technology, and creates a backhaul link for the mesh to communicate, but in my case I was replacing existing APs so I had ethernet cable available and the discs will use this ethernet link for the backhaul saving bandwidth on WiFi for my clients.

For me its working well with all my devices - I even changde the SSID & WPA2 key so that my existing devices didn't need to be reconfigured. I now have what appears to be seamless roaming as I move around my home without having to wait for my phone etc to decide that the really poor signal from the other end of the house has finally dropped before roaming. I always seem to have a full signal and speed tests which match my internet connection max of 50Mmbps.

Have a look at the FAQs here if you want a little more info http://btsupport.custhelp.com/app/answers/list/c/8071

[PeterClarke]

Hi, I have set whole home wifi and it does take a couple of days for it to settle down - finding the "right balance" of channels for the 2.4 and 5Ghz WiFi channels. The Discs seem to have a single IP address provided by DHCP and some others with static IP addresses and undocumented Mac addresses. The static IPs clash with existing IP addresses, the mac addresses begin with E6: the 2nd and third octet are identical to the Dics mac addresses for 2.4 and 5Ghz None of this is available in the manuals/ guides and for a business unknown IP/mac addresses are a security concern. Can anyone shed some light before I declare a router virus??? Thanks Peter

[Keith_Beddoe]

@PeterClarke

Are you a business customer, as I would not consider that the system is secure or suitable for business use. Bear in mind that this is a residential forum and products like the BT home hub, and BT Whole Home WiFi are intended to domestic usage, as is the BT residential broadband product. This is actually mentioned in the residential T&Cs.

If it security you are concerned about, then BT Business broadband would be a better choice.