EE Smart hub plus versus BT Smart Hub 2

[bobdanbh]

As I'm being moved to EE from BT I currently have the two hubs sitting next to each other. Throughout the (parts of) the house that they both cover the old BT hub gives consistently better signal strength than the Smart hub plus.

Is this to be expected? I am still within the cooling off period so would appreciate advice.

[licquorice]

See which channels the old hub is using then set the new hub to the same channels but don't operate both hubs at the same time or they will interfere with each other if set to the same channels.

[bobdanbh]

Thanks for the suggestion. I didn't want to mess around with the new (EE) hub if I were going to send it back.

So I turned them on individually - i.e. not both on simultaneously - and measured the wifi signal strength at the same places. I used Net Analyzer on my phone.

The EE hub was consistently between 2 and 5 dBm worse, and once as bad as 7 dBm in an area which is usually covered by a booster, which was turned off of course. There wasn't much fluctuation over time in the readings.

I haven't tried to connect the EE hub to the broadband but can't really see why that would make any difference.

I have an Openreach man coming tomorrow morning to "install" the EE kit but currently I feel like using the cooling off period to reject the EE kit. Any further suggestions?

[licquorice]

Whatever does it matter if you change channels on a router you are going to send back, it's a configurable option.

Unless you are comparing the same channels, you are comparing apples and oranges.

[bobdanbh]

I'll try that then.

I thought these hubs were 'intelligent" in that they selected the best channel. 

[bobdanbh]

I set the EE hub to the same channel as the BT one and repeated my experiments. The signals                                                         were generally about the same but I was surprised that the dBm varies so much over a few 10s of seconds and so conclusions are hard to reach.

The mean of the BT hub is a bit better than that of the EE one, but the variances are such that this is not statistically significant. 

All in all, no compelling reason to change. I'll see what the Openreach person says when/if she/he arrives.