I have a 3 disk installation of BT Whole Home Wifi and in general I am very pleased with the way it performs. It has solved the problem of coverage in my Victorian terraced house which is narrow but deep at nearly 50ft from front to back. And it has nice thick internal walls.
[I originally had a BT Home hub with both Ethernet and WiFi at the front of the house; with an Ethernet connection to an old Netgear hub repurposed as a Wifi repeater at the back of the house, all on the first floor. It just about did the job but Wifi coverage to the downstairs back room was poor from the repeater in the room above.]
The new Whole Home Wifi is much more effective in its coverage, especially in the downstairs back room.
It consists of
- Master disk connected by Ethernet to Home Hub 5. This is on an upstairs landing right in the middle of the house. Excellent Connection
- Second disk is downstairs in the kitchen also in the middle of the house. Good Connection
- Third disk is downstairs in back room nearly at the back of the house. Good Connection
- Firmware is 1.02.06 Build 12
And it all works splendidly most of the time but there is some odd behaviour at times notably with my Sony Bravia kdl42w653a which has built in Wifi and is in the back room near the third disk. This always worked with the old repeater even if other things in the same room didn’t.
But now with Whole Home Wifi the TV sometimes drops out on Iplayer and also accessing my Synology NAS, which is on the LAN; so it is clearly a local network problem, not internet. I cannot reset network from the Sony menu. Switching off AND pulling the plug out is necessary to clear it. I thought it might be DHCP leases running out so I fixed the IP address, might have made it more stable but hasn’t cured it.
But it gets stranger, using the BT WholeHome app I noted in my investigations that the TV was at times actually connecting to the upstairs master which must be 25 feet and one story away. The Sony TV network reported only 3 blobs out of 5 for signal strength. Then after switching off for a while it connected once more to the third disk only 4 feet away this time getting 5 blobs .
I do not get it, other devices like laptops and phones connect readily to the back room disk. What is the problem with the TV ?
Thoroughly suspicious now, I started looking at how other devices connect and have seen strange stuff, for example my tablet when I am using it in my bedroom on 1st floor front of house starts off connecting to the landing as I expect , then suddenly switches to the 2nd disk in the kitchen which is much farther away and downstairs [though on same side of the house]
Can anybody explain how Whole Home Wifi or indeed mesh networks make what seem to me to make bizarre connectivity decisions ?
[and I apologise and crave your indulgence for the length of this post]
Regards
Bob
