BT Whole Home dropouts and firmware upgrade

[Hippogriff]

I turned off the wireless radio on the main router a couple of days ago.

The drop-outs of the SSID provided by the BTWH system appear to have lessened, but they haven't certainly not ended completely. It happened again this morning, even though the most recent download of the combined logs show nothing at all since the 31.01.2026. Isn't that, in itself, odd?

I haven't upgraded the firmware as yet. The one I have has been stable for years, and I don't think it's related to the issue, but I still may jump (to rule it out more than anything).

Anyway, just updating...

[Hippogriff]

I rebooted the system today, after further - more frequent - dropouts of the Whole Home SSID over the last few days.

I know a basic step like a restart of the system might be small-fry... but I'm leery of making actual changes. The good news from this is that the log has finally started to log new entries... I now see:

05.03.2026 12:41:09 [2 4 2] OWL-IF[2G]:STA(88:71:E5:9E:05:AE)Added into unfriendly station list(BAND_STEER)rec(1085)dur(3600)

It had always perplexed me that it hadn't added any new lines for what seemed like weeks. I'll see how the restart does before considering a firmware upgrade.

[Hippogriff · Accepted solution]

It's the 22nd of March now, on the 13th of March (Friday the 13th) I had a second-hand ASUS DSL AC68U delivered from eBay and I've been running without dropouts for more than a week.

I never changed anything on the BT Whole Home setup. I just removed the TP-LINK Archer VR2100 from the equation and restored the saved configuration from my old ASUS where the port to the outside world had, apparently, burned out. Dropout issues magically gone.

If anyone has this similar kind of behaviour, the 'resolution' may be the same. It was a red-herring me thinking this was BTWH related.

Hopefully this ASUS DSL AC68U lasts as long as I need it.