BT Whole Home Wi-Fi keeps dropping (Pack of 3 Discs)

[cordycordy]

Hi all, I have the BT Whole Home Wi-Fi, Pack of 3 Discs in conjunction with BT Broadband (smart hub).

The Whole Home  discs are set up via the app. All discs are less than 3 months old, including our main BT Smart Hub.

However, around 1-2 times per day, the "master" white whole home disc will drop, which takes the other white discs with it.

Our black BT Smart Hub remains connected and BT have run checks which shows no dropping/outage at all, so they claim its a Whole Home issue. Weirdly... around 3-6 months ago, exactly the same issue was happening with our previous set of white discs and previous smart hub, which was a lot of the reason we purchased the new equipment...!

I have done factory resets already on all equipment.

As a final comment, my son is kicked out of his Xbox (which is connected to the Smarthub, not Whole Home) on a daily basis due to connection issues... not sure if this is connected though.

Any thoughts/ideas please?

[lymat]

All 3 of my discs went red overnight. Cant get them to work so have an engineer coming Saturday.  Software update? But now see BT no longer giving/selling them and  they are trying to put everyone on EE. Is this a coincidence?

[Keith_Beddoe]

@lymat 

Welcome to this user forum for BT Residential phone and broadband customers.

It would be best to give the WHW product helpdesk a call on 0808 100 6116 ( Mon to Fri 9am to 5.30pm and Sat 9am to 2pm) or drop them an email to: btconnectedhome@bt.com and they'll be happy to help.

[cordycordy]

Hmmmm, good luck trying to get a resolution from the help desk. They’ve been no help whatsoever and my issue still continues.

[naylor2006]

The master disc will 'reboot' if it loses LAN connectivity.

Back when I had a Virgin Media Router this used to reboot quite a lot, cable being unstable sometimes or maintenance taking place on the network forcing a reboot.

Because the LAN connection would drop the master disc would starting looking for a wireless partner, like its unwired friends do in normal operation. (Not to say you cant wire them all because you can and its best to do that anyway)

So the master disc loses ethernet connection to the router whilst the LAN ports on the router momentarily lose power during a router reboot....so the master discs reboots and subsequently your other two discs will also go red and reboot looking for the master.

I use the term reboot because the process when it goes red then purple then flashing blue is kinda the same as when you power cycle it.

If you want the discs to stop doing this install a cheap unmanaged switch between the router and the master disc, this means that no matter what happens to the hub, reboot, disconnects, whatever, the master disc will still be happy because it has a ethernet connection and stay up even if it has no internet to serve.

Now, this does not explain why your hub is apparently up all the time whilst this happens but I would put this unmanaged switch in between the hub and the master disc to rule this out, this way no matter what the hub does the master will stay blue, this solved that issue for me.

If you want to monitor your internet connection and whether it is truly up always then head over to Think Broadband and follow the free guide and set one up, heres my monitor for example:

Broadband Quality Monitor | thinkbroadband

This chart will have bit red lines in it if your line drops.

[lymat]

Thank you for all the information.  A lot to take on board for a non-tech oldie.  Will try and check out your suggestions. In a mess as my printer etc wont work either so am right fed up.

[naylor2006]

Don’t worry, I’ve been in IT since the 90’s and I still want to throw my HP wireless printer out the window, the thing does my head in.

TP-Link and Netgear both do cheap 5 port switches for under £20.

Grab a spare Ethernet cable and plug one end into the BT Hub and the other into any port on the new switch, then connect up your master disc to any port on the new switch via Ethernet cable also.

You don’t need to do anything in software etc, also now you have 3 extra Ethernet ports on the new switch to use if you need them.

This should help with preventing the master disc from rebooting and subsequently stopping the two discs doing the same as a result.

[lymat]

Thank you SO much. Will try and organise after taking DH to hospital!

[naylor2006]

Buy it from somewhere with a decent returns policy (Amazon) if it doesnt solve the issue.

Once you have it setup, unplug the BT Hub and you should observe that the Master Disc does nothing as a result. Once you have that part ruled out power the Hub back on. If you continue to start seeing the master disc dropping and rebooting then its possible to look at the logs on it accessing it via a browser. You can post back here if you like and I will try help you with that if you need.