Hi. I have a BT Business Hub and 6 Whole Home range extender discs. The system has been and still is working well.
The problem is that living in a very rural area we have no 3G/4G/5G mobile coverage so our smart meter can't "phone home". Therefore, our energy provider has put us in a "bleeding edge" (and I really mean bleeding edge) trial of connecting our smart meter through our broadband connection - but it hasn't worked.
Their feedback is that in situations where there there is just a broadband hub the system works well, in situations where there are any sort of range extenders in place the system fails.
Twenty years ago I worked as a high level engineer in data comms; I'm a bit rusty and so I've been reading up on some of the issues and it seems that channel contention and signal bleed over between the WIFI and Zigbee is a "thing".
The really odd thing about this is the way the meter works. It communicates - so I was told - with the In Home Display unit (IHD) by Zigbee and then it's the IHD that connects to the WIFI to dial my energy supplier.
Questions:
1. How do the Whole Home discs communicate between themselves? My guess is that it's also Zigbee but I can't find anything on line to confirm this.
2. I have reset my main router to channel 1 (from 11 where there is a known clash with Zigbee) and my Whole Home discs are happily blasting away on Channel 6, BUT is it possible to re-tune them to a different channel as well?
3. Can anyone add any other useful info to this problem please?
I've seen conflicting accounts of how Zigbee and 2.4 GHz WIFI can interact, and given that Zigbee has now been deprecated in favour of a standard called Matter it seems to be getting harder to make sense of what's happening.
Thanks for your time.
