Reliability of Home Hub 2

[Rmh56]

I’ve had FTTP for almost 3 years. First 2 years worked perfectly - Home Hub 2 plus 3 black discs.

For the last 6 months it’s been really unreliable.. almost on a whim, all 3 discs will go red and I have to factory reset the hub and then factory reset and reconnect all 3 discs. If that fails, I swap out the hub for a spare and repeat the whole exercise, which “seems” to work.. until the next time.

I don’t understand, this is primarily software with a few wires in between..what can go wrong?

I’ve spent 4 hours doing this today - last time was 6 weeks ago. Seriously considering binning the entire hardware and starting with new 3rd party routers and mesh system - except that’s gonna cost and why should I? Tech support coming Saturday but if it’s working, concerned he’ll just shrug and say “working as expected”

FTTP is transformational but needs to be entirely reliable.. any thoughts?

thanks

[DavidM]

Hi @Rmh56 and welcome.

Thanks for posting. I'm sorry you're having connection problems. Hopefully the engineer will be able to run a few checks and get this sorted for you. Please post back and let us know how you get on.

Cheers

David

[Rmh56]

Well that didn’t last 48 hours!

woke to find all 3 discs red

i don’t have the energy or time to spend another 4 hours fixing this.. maybe invest the time looking at 3rd party routers and mesh systems… not happy…

[ickpers]

Ive heard of those discs causing problems after updating their firmware. Personally Ive had terrible experiences with all those mesh networks, even the expensive Netgears ones.

What I done was change the router to an Asus router and I didnt really need the mesh network after that. It helps if the router is in the centre of your house, so you might need to get bt out to change the socket location if you were going to do that.

If you are gonna get a new router get a wifi 6 one.

[Rmh56]

Hi.. thanks for the tip on WiFi 6!

I need some form of mesh to connect the Sky Q boxes together (1 main box and 2 mini boxes) via Ethernet (you can do it wirelessly but it’s quite flaky).

Oddly, I power cycled one of the discs this morning - it went back to blue and so did the others without power cycling.

I’ve saved the router event log so that the engineer can see any odd behaviour leading up to all 3 dropping out.

[ickpers]

Could you use powerline adapters to connect the sky q boxes instead of using the mesh wifi network?

I use powerline for any computers, tvs and consoles. They dont require any upkeep or configuring at all. Just basically plug in and go.

[Rmh56]

Yes, I’ve previously used Devolo power line adaptors and they’re great. For some reason they don’t work with the BT hub (no idea why..), so you’re right.. I’d probably try the power line adaptors first. Thanks!

[licquorice]

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@Rmh56 wrote:

Yes, I’ve previously used Devolo power line adaptors and they’re great. For some reason they don’t work with the BT hub (no idea why..), so you’re right.. I’d probably try the power line adaptors first. Thanks!

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I suspect that you didn't factory reset them before setting them up again with the Hub and they were set to a different IP subnet from the previous router.

[Rmh56]

Oh..good point! No, I didn’t..I’ll try that. Thanks!

[Rmh56]

Sadly that didn’t go well..

BT tech support had a look.. couldn’t see anything wrong, suggested new discs, left one and ordered another two.

connected new disc, paired with hub but went red when disconnected.. worse, other 2 discs went red and no amount of reset resolved it….

so that’s it! Ordered new tp-link WiFi 6 router and mesh system. 
I did try but sorry BT.. it just doesn’t work well enough!

of course it means I’m not tied to BT as a Service provider when contract renewal comes up….