Hub Horrors, Disc Dilemmas, Speed Shocks - BT H/W - Bin it?

[originalracingsnake]

I'm on FTTP, and the 500 speed package with whole home, I have 3 black discs in a 3 story 90's brick built house.

The hub is located on the ground floor, I have a disc on the Ground, 1st and 2nd floor.

I'm on my 3rd hub as the others were sooooooo slllloooooooooowwwwwwwwww I thought maybe the air had turned to treacle, or I had fallen back into a parallel dimension where I was on dial up and hearing the meeeeep-meep-brrrr-bip-mi-merrr-screeeeeeee of a modem downloading some ASCII images that look like boobs from 10 ft away. The latest Hub has been better, but recent days have seen the WiFi from the top floor drop to 2MBps, and those ASCII images are taking an age to form on my CRT. Teams calls have to be done audio only.

Now, I have run a WiFi analyser, and can see the channels in use by the hub. I can't configure the hub onto a less congested channel as you can't manually select from ALL of the channels, only about 5 or so. Tried "smart" settings again which short term worked, then it all went slow again. Essentially the further you are from the hub, the worse it gets. Though you don't have to go far. Wife works in a room right next to the hub, it's on her desk. 470MBps.

Leave that room and go to the one next door, which has a disc in it, 60.. Kitchen? No disc but is running 40. All other discs refuse to serve up anything over 40, and certainly NEVER 100.

Yes I've used the BT app to site the discs but that doesn't always meet with SWMBO idea of a Feng Shui utopian, clutterless set up of the discs and associated perches for those discs. They ought not to be SO sensitive to placement in any case, it is like they are Hollywood A listers demanding the finest views, wines, and tofu. I'm sick of them and their fussiness. So my question is:

Do I spend on a completely new set-up, put the BT equipment in the cupboard with the Breville toasted sarnie maker, George Foreman Grill, Bread maker and electric tin opener, or do I keep on bothering BT for yet another engineer to come round in his blue overshoes, shrug whilst scrolling Facebook, recommend I ask for a new router, and remain this stupid situation all whilst paying top dollar for it?

My concern would be finding that some new fangled mesh set-up is just as slow as the BT stuff is.

Thanks for getting this far. Anyone for a beer?

[Keith_Beddoe]

As the second and third discs are only repeating the signal from the first one, the speed will drop on each hop, as each disc has to receive data, and then re-transmit it. This has the effect of reducing the throughput. 

As they are all competing for connection  timeslots on the same channel, performance is going to be poor.

Ideally you would be better running an Ethernet cable to each floor, and connecting the discs to that, or better still, separate wireless access points running on different channels.

Powerline adapters may also give better results.

https://www.tp-link.com/uk/home-networking/powerline/tl-wpa4220-tkit/

A third party mesh may work better, however it may also operate in daisy-chaining mode, if other discs cannot connect to the master disc.

[originalracingsnake]

Keith,

Thanks for the quick reply. I hadn't realised the are daisy chained, explains why the 3rd floor is the worst... Oddly enough I did try my old TP-LINK powerlines today but the office circuit is not the same as the router one, so it won't work.

Cabling not an option either as the house is so complex and it would be impossible to conceal it all, cables on the outside would be a no-no too.

I'm leaning towards the Deco X55 AX3000 mesh AP's for now. Reports and reviews are good.

Thanks for the input.

[Keith_Beddoe]

I use the Deco E4, originally with three nodes, but added a fourth to reach the garage at the bottom of the garden. You would need a Deco with a faster Ethernet port.

I have a 9Mb BT ADSL connection, and a Three Mobile 4G connection which are interchangeable. The mobile broadband is quite a bit faster, but has a limited data allowance.

The TP Decos seem to work very well, and the information provided by the app, is excellent.

My Deco nodes all link back to the master one connected to my internal network, so there is no daisy chaining.

I used to have a Tenda Nova MW3 mesh, but it always used channel 6 on the 2.4GHz band, and it was not possible to change it.

The Deco however, finds the best channel out of the 12 ones normally available. Its sitting on channel 5 at the moment, which works well with lots of external devices around the garden and house.

[dave44]

I'm using a mix of Decos and think they're great 

2 x XE75 in the house (one downstairs and one upstairs) using the 6GHz bandwidth as dedicated backhaul between them, and I can get around 700mbps WiFi from both nodes.

And I also have an M5 in an outbuilding which is daisy chained off the second XE75. I can usually still get between 100 and 150 mbps from this node.

[originalracingsnake]

Popular opinion seems to be in favour of the Deco system.

Last question, has anyone here replaced the hub/discs with the Deco, and seen a massive uplift in performance? I know it depends on a lot of environmental factors and my mileage may vary, but it'd be interesting to hear.

[originalracingsnake]

Are you guys that use Decos, retaining the BT Hub, or are you going solo on the Decos?

I have FTTP, so could in theory, plug the ethernet cable from the Openreach socket directly into the Deco, enter the username and password, and be rid of the Hub.

I've heard BT don't like this? Is that anecdotal, or proven?

[licquorice]

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@originalracingsnake wrote:

I've heard BT don't like this? Is that anecdotal, or proven?

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Total nonsense, BT don't care a jot what router you use.

[naylor2006]

I use an ER-X connected directly to the ONT and I have BT Wholehome AC2600 Mesh covering WIFI for my house. The walls are all so thick any ISP provided WIFI AP or Router barely makes it to the next room.

My property isnt even that big but I picked up addon disks off ebay for half the retail price and I have 8 now, which if you want full speed in every room, at least in my house this is required.

The BT Wholehome Mesh disks do not use a separate backend WIFI network to talk to each other which some other 'better' solutions do, this removes some of the weight on the daisy chaining. I can expect in the best case scenario for the WIFI speed to drop around half each hop. Over time I have just found ways to get ethernet to each Mesh point, 7 of the 8 now are connected to the backend router, just need to figure out the kitchen WH disk....

Sometimes Powerline Adapters connected to the WIFI mesh disks can improve things, not from my experience though, can depend on wiring and interference, I never got over 40Mbps from Powerline in my house, ethernet is the way unless you have some old Coax already in the wall and then you can use MOCA adapters, I used these for one hook up and its amazing, 2.5 Gbit wired!

[originalracingsnake]

Good news, many thanks.