do I have too many devices trying to connect to my Fibre 1 broadband?

[JBOMCO]

I am having problems getting all of our devices to successfully connect to our broadband in the day time so wondered if there is a limited to the number of devices that should be used.  We have 5 mobiles, 2 TVs, 4 laptops, 1, Desktop, 1 xbox, 1 Nest, & 2 radios.  16 in total. At peak we will be trying to use 4 laptops, 4 mobiles & 1 TV as a minimum = 9 devices and we struggle to get all of these working , particularly the laptops which are needed for working & studying during the day.

[Keith_Beddoe]

@JBOMCO 

Which BT Home Hub are you using?

What speed is your broadband?

https://speedtest.btwholesale.com/

[Gary_C]

Well, I have 23 devices currently connected with no problems.

Do you mean they refuse to actually make a connection or when connected, they have poor speed ?

[JBOMCO]

The initial few connect then other cannot connect.

[JBOMCO]

The initial few devices connect and they the rest do not connect or when they do they drop out at certain points during the day and fail to connect unit perhaps after the peak hours.

[Keith_Beddoe]

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@JBOMCO wrote:

The initial few connect then other cannot connect.

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Try a factory reset of the home hub, as its possible that it has run out of internal connections.

http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/11386/%7E/how-do-i-reset-my-bt-hub-to-its-factory-set...

Then turn off smart setup.

http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/44328/~/switching-smart-setup-on-and-off-on-the-bt-ho...

[JBOMCO]

I have reset my BT hub 3 and will see how it all goes tomorrow.  The link for turning off smart setup does not contain instruction for hub 3 but does for hub 4 & 5?

[Keith_Beddoe]

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@JBOMCO wrote:

I have reset my BT hub 3 and will see how it all goes tomorrow.  The link for turning off smart setup does not contain instruction for hub 3 but does for hub 4 & 5?

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You have an old home hub, so you must also have a white Openreach modem as well, as the HH3 will not work without that, on a Fibre 1 connection.

The HH3 is not that good with wireless connections, and if you asked BT for a home hub 6, you should get a better connection, and you would not need the modem.

There are also some very good third party modem/routers available, which people have reported better results with. These also do not need the modem.

https://www.tp-link.com/uk/home-networking/dsl-modem-router/archer-vr400/v2/

[TimCurtis]

@JBOMCO 

The other thing to consider is if the mobiles are iPhones running IOS14 then you need to turn off the Private Address function against your wifi SSID. This "wonderful" feature in iOS14 , which is set to ON by default, means that every time an iPhone/iPad reconnects to your wifi it gets another assigned IP Address which if the reconnects are frequent enough then the router/hub could potentially run out of addresses to assign without it being reset.