BT Whole Home Premium - Constant disconnects and resetting every 2 to 5 mins

[RyanWholeHome]

Hi all,

Appreciate the support and help.

I currently have 900meg Full fibre in my house that connects to a 3 disc Whole Home Premium setup that covers the house.

For a decent time all was well outside of a few random disconnects/resets

I've just bought a new PC, set it up and on connecting to one of the discs it triggered the main Disc connected to the Smarthub2 to reset , (flash red, then purple, then blue) which naturally reset the one in the office the PC is connected to

I believe this sudden disconnect is triggered by any download occuring from the PC, (initially all I did was download Chrome but that caused it to happen) and now its happening sporadically by itself even with the PC not connected.

I called BT and followed the advice, reset everything, changed the primary disc over, tried it with just two etc and the same problems exist. 

It does have periods of stability but then any download on any device (we tried an Iphone downloading an App) seems to trigger it to do this sudden crash and reset.

I've looked through the guides on here and tried to hunt out the info as best I can but am running up dry so would hugely appreciate any advice or steer, happy to supply any info that would help

Sadly I can't connect the PC directly to the SmartHub on ethernet as its the very opposite end of the house and the inner wall wiring of ethernets all over the house is a project a while off yet as much as I'd love to have that done.

Appreciate you reading this and thank you for any comments

Cheers

Ryan

[RyanWholeHome]

By way of update, I did some tests and the below was my setup

- I've reset the Discs, and switched the Primary out

- I turned off and on the SmartHub2 (left it off for 10 seconds then turned it on)

- Legacy steering disabled

- All connected devices removed, so nothing is connecting to it at all.

- 3 Disc setup, 1 Primary, Ethernet connected to the Smart Hub2, the other 2 discs in places around the house

Test 1 - I connect the PC to the Wifi, which because of location is going through a Secondary Disc. after a few seconds the Primary goes purple, drops connection and kicks the secondary discs into Red until the Primary comes back up and they reconnect. Once they do the PC then attempts automatically to connect and again and the cycle continues. After about 5mins it stabilise and holds connection until I run a speedtest at which point it causes the Primary to go purple and the cycle continues.

Test 2 - I disconnected the PC and stopped it auto connecting so there were no devices, I then connected the PS5 which because of location is connecting to a different secondary disc and that was ok initially, and then I loaded a game that requires online connection and it triggered the Primary to go purple, reset, cycle, however after that it seemed fine (tested for a further 10mins or so)

Test 3 - I disconnected the PS5 and stopped it auto connecting so there were no devices, I then connected a Mac book which because of location would connect directly to the Primary. This was fine, I did some websites, normal browsing and then tried a speed test at which point it triggered the Purple light and cycle. I waited for it come back up but before I could do the speed test it went back to Purple again, after that it stablised and let me do the speed test.

Test 4 - I left the Mac connected and then connected my Iphone which connected fine, I tried an AppStore download and that worked fine, did the speed test on phone and that worked fine

Some final things to note,

Before I bought and connected this PC, the Discs had been mostly running without issue since I bought it. 

Also the SmartHub2 has been bulletproof and will happily handle anything without failing.

Obviously this level of sporadic downtime leaves me in a challenging position to trust it will work when expected.

One strange thing is in the logs alot of the lines are time stamped as 2013, with the occasional one the correct date/time

Any help/direction is appreciated

[RyanWholeHome · Accepted solution]

So Final update 🙂

Refunded via Amazon and upgraded to the TP-Link Deco XE75 Pro so hopefully I have more luck with that!

The issues I faced above got worse meaning it was disconnecting and cycling on any attempt at access, be that Phone, laptop etc

BT Tech support were great and as it was in warranty gave me a claim number which I could use with Amazon for a refund,

Consider this case closed 🙂

[chrisjp]

Glad for you that it's closed but it leaves the puzzle about why the Wholehome disc suddenly started misbehaving as it did. Just a thought - which ethernet socket on the SH2 was the primary Wholehome disc connected to? Was it perhaps the 4th one that can be converted between LAN and WAN?

[RyanWholeHome]

He Chris,

Thanks for replying, It was connected to 1 for the majority of its life, with me cycling it through 2 and 3 near the end to see if that had any positive effect on the problems (to no avail) 

Socket 4 was connecting the SH2 to the main BT box on the wall.

But agreed, the mystery will have to go unsolved. I do still have the units ahead of sending them back to Amazon if you or anyone else has ideas about how to fix

[stingray75]

I have the original BT Whole Home Wi-Fi discs (not the premium version) and it's been working great for many years. However, things started playing up when I enabled the DHCP server feature of AdGuard which was running in a docker container on my NAS, instead of using the router's DHCP.   This caused the BT discs to lose connectivity and I noticed the logs were dated 2012. It looked like the discs couldn't successfully negotiate with the DHCP server, so didn't obtain an IP address, so couldn't resolve NTP and set the date correctly.  Even if I set the discs to static IPs, it didn't work.

In the end I reverted back to the router's DHCP server and all is still good.