Whole home mesh speed limitations?

[Pro1]

We've just had FTTP installed and have the 900. 

Stats are great with 

Download 905.8 Mb/s and Upload 112.0 Mb/s to the hub.

We have four of the original BT Whole home discs scattered about the house. The smarthub2  wifi is turned off and we use the discs for wifi.

Ive noticed if that they seem to be allowing around 200mbps, maybe a smidge more in total to devices. If I'm doing a download on something at 200mbps and I download on a different device at the same time it uses some of the 200mbps from the first device so device 1 will goto say 130mbps and the second to 70mbps. Is this because the whole home discs I have have reached the limit to what the can do?

I have noticed that I can't buy the whole home discs I have anymore on Amazon and they are just under 4 years old and have AC2600 connection written in the description on Amazon if that helps.

Any ideas please?

Thanks 🙂

[philip42h]

Ideas only ... AC2600 implies that these devices have a theoretical maximum transmission rate of 2,600 Mbps. Which means that if you deployed them all in the same room, less than 1m apart, you might get something close to that. In practice you have them distributed all about the house with walls in the way etc.. Under those circumstances, 200 Mbps doesn't seem too bad, and is certainly fast enough for anything that most of us are likely to want to do.

So, yes, you have pretty much reached the limit of what that system can do. You might do better by adding more discs so that they were closer, together or by looking at the next generation of technology - but do you really need to? 😉

[rbz5416]

AC2600 refers to the combined speeds of the 2.4GHz (866mbps) & 5GHz (1733mbps) bands. You will never achieve this as it's impossible to connect to both bands simultaneously. Further the individual speeds are theoretical maximums which will also never be reached. 

If these are first gen discs then then they are repeaters rather than mesh, which again reduces real world speed. See this thread. You may be able to improve performance by connecting each disc to the router by ethernet, but that's unlikely to be practical. This review claimed to see around 500mbps from a directly wired disc but only around 250mbps from a repeater.

You also need to bear in mind the limitations of the WiFi chips in the connected devices.

[Pro1]

Thanks for the replies, as always very helpful 🙂

Is there anything else you can recommend to replace them that would be more unto date with the FTTP I have now? I think we would need 3 units.

I don't live in a big house and we have no brick internal walls so 4 discs are probably a bit over kill but they came in 2 per pack and I got a good deal on the second pack so couldn't refuse. 😄

Ive had a look on Amazon but there's that many different ones and most of the review sites are geared up for commission click income.

Thanks 🙂

[rbz5416]

If the house isn't huge & is open plan I'm surprised you need discs at all. Have you tried reverting to just the SM2 & maybe relocating it? Do you have or intend to get Digital Voice?

[Pro1]

We have the the Smarthub 2 router and have it located near the front door. We have nothing that uses internet near it and just have one of the WH hubs plugged into it. Its only located where it is due to where the outside wiring is coming into the house.

The house isn't open plan but all the walls are just plaster boards with no weight bearing brick walls up or down stairs. (Steel framed)

We have around 40-50 devices dotted around with around 7 having heavy use such as xbox, computers and streaming.

1 of the WH discs located downstairs but on the other side of the house from the router is wired to a hub that has numerous devices connected via ethernet such as hubs for hive, hue etc. So we would need an ethernet connection in that location.

[philip42h]

If you look in the BT Shop you can buy more discs of the type that you already have; replace them with the Premium version (about 50% faster); or go for WiFi 6 which is at least 2x faster (and quite expensive). But I repeat my question, why? - want is it that you want to do that needs all this 'speed'?

Edit: OK, you at least part answer my  question while I was typing ... 🙂