BT Whole Home Wi-Fi 6 - Airplay and HomeKit issues

[ChrisA1]

Good Morning all,

I have 3 of the BT Whole Home Wi-Fi 6 discs with BT being my ISP.  (I went for these rather than the complete discs as I believed they would give faster speeds).

On the whole these have been working well with very few if any disconnects but my issue is that I run into a raft of issues when I try to airplay from my iPhone to any HomePods or apple tvs. Additionally, when I try to submit a personal request to a HomePod it often responds telling me that my iPhone is not on the same network so it cannot deal with the request. 

If I turn off the discs completely and use the smart hub 2, I do not get any of these issues but I am then plagued with poor signal coverage. My assumption would be that the mesh network is not compatible with airplay but I have tried turning off all the discs besides the main one (effectively creating a one router solution) but this did not work either.

This leads me to believe it is a setting on the whole home discs rather than it being a mesh network which is causing the issue but does not appear to be many options or settings on the discs that I can change. I am hesitate to change any settings on the smart hub 2 because this seems to work on its own as above.

Any help would be great!

Thanks

Chris

[licquorice]

I assume you have turned off the wifi on your hub as it will not form part of the mesh with the whole home discs as do the complete wifi discs. Also make sure you have turned off Smart setup on the hub. https://www.bt.com/help/broadband/what-is-smart-setup-on-the-bt-hub--how-can-i-turn-it-on-and-off-

[ChrisA1]

Hi 

When I am running the discs, I have turned off wifi on the smart hub 2 and smart setup is off. Airplay does not work correctly during this setup.

Currently I have turned off the discs and enabled the smart hub 2 wifi (both bands) and I run into no airplay issues when doing this.

[ChrisA1]

Any ideas?

[drjames]

Same issues here, with whole-home wi-fi 6.  Have been through all of the settings on the hub and discs, no airplay compatibility.  Will return immediately if it can't be resolved. 

[ChrisA1]

Unfortunately, I only became aware of the extent of the issue after the period for return expired on mine. I have been in communication with BT support since my original post but they have not been helpful and often unresponsive. I have been escalated but still the suggests are basic in nature such as “have you checked that the WiFi is turned off on the router?”. 

I have tried every setting and configuration that I can find on the discs both through the app and the web interface including the steering options etc. No progress and I have also since tried a mesh system from a well known alternative and it has worked perfectly with no airplay issues whatsoever. 

[drjames]

Thanks Chris, yeah looks like it's unfit for purpose. 

[SomeIrishGuy]

I have to same problem with the standard ‘whole home’ disks. What mesh system did you try that works?

[countrypaul]

I do not have Airplay so bear in mind this may be a misinterpretation but I thought that some users had reported problems with Airplay when not all the devices are on the same frequency (2.4 or 5 GHz ).

I also think I recall that some WiFi APs do not seem to allow direct communications between WiFi clients, not sure on the details or if there were solutions but might be something for you to look into.

I am not sure whether #i saw these reports on this site or some other.