Is BT Complete Wifi any good - for me ;) ?

[philip42h]

@ptrduffy Thanks. I now know of someone who has done this successfully, and I guess we need a disc every 8-10 metres to get good coverage. 200Mbps in each room would be sublime - I'd be very happy with around 50Mbps reliably.

[philip42h]

@rbz5416  does the Complete Wifi disc support use of an Ethernet connection for the backhaul? The 'instructions' show the use of Ethernet for set-up but 'imply' that you switch to wireless in use.

I'm assuming that it does since you suggested that approach, and, presumably this would allow the Discs to be placed slightly further apart without excessive loss of speed ...

This would give me another option in respect of the rather thick and impenetrable walls - namely to use the existing Ethernet over Powerline stuff to provide an Ethernet backhaul. It manages speeds between 500 Mbps and 1 Gbps  which if stable might help considerably ...

[philip42h]

@c64z86  I am very well aware that having 900 Mbps is pretty laughable, and ironic, since when I truly needed speed I was limited to 1 Mbps at best! FTTP arrive after I retired ... 

My desktop is directly connected to the SH2 so I currently benefit from 75 Mbps upload and 500 Mbps download from that box which is handy for back-ups to the cloud and such like, I doubt that having 900 Mbps will make things much faster since I am probably already limited by the bandwidth available at the far end rather than what is available to me.

TBH 50Mbps everywhere would be fine - I just 'need' to stretch coverage a little further than it goes today, and ensure that the wife can roam between access points without dropping the connection ... 😉

[c64z86]

Oh yeah it's really awesome to have that speed, and just think that one day in the far future 900mbps will probably be the minimum needed for holographic virtual reality interfaces or something like 32k video 😆

I know it might sound silly, but I often wonder how fast the network connections are aboard starships like Voyager on Star Trek? I mean it takes place at least 300 years in future, so their speeds will probably be insane compared to anything we can dream of today! Heck the home internet connections back on Earth alone would probably be something like 1tbps or even 1pbps per second.

So I'm more than ready for 900mpbs to become the norm, then I can upgrade to it for cheap! 😄

Yeah the discs are great at handling roaming, my phone and laptop changes seamlessly from the hub to a wifi disc and back as I move through the house. I even tested it out while watching 1080p youtube and it didn't even hiccup when connecting to the disc and back. If you have an older device, it might not be so seamless though, and by older I mean something like a Windows 7-XP laptop.

[rbz5416]

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@philip42hwrote:

  does the Complete Wifi disc support use of an Ethernet connection for the backhaul?

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My suggestion of daisy-chaining was really in terms of a third party option, as they usually have at least two LAN ports. So one in & one out to the next disc. The BT discs only have a single LAN port so this wouldn't be possible. Assuming they support it (I know very little about them), you would have to run ethernet from each disc back to the SH2 or an intermediate switch. That may be possible with powerline or you may run into similar issues as you have now.

But having said all that your expectations/requirements are quite modest, so WiFi only may well suffice.

[philip42h]

... and searching through other threads it would appear that the answer is 'yes' - I can use an Ethernet backhaul to get through an extra thick wall!

https://community.bt.com/t5/Archive-Staging/Connect-black-disc-to-hub-via-8port-switch/m-p/2176630#M...

and others ...

I'm definitely running out of excuses not to try this out ... 🙂

[philip42h]

A quick post to complete this thread ...

I waited 'til Christmas was over and upgraded to Full Fibre 900 with BT Halo 3+ so I now have 900 Mbps down, 110 Mbps up measurably delivered to the SH2.

With the SH2 and a pair of Complete WiFi black discs I have reliable WiFi throughout the property - which is exactly what BT promise:

• At the extremities it is no more than 20 Mbps; at best - i.e. over WiFi a few centimetres from a disc - I'll get around 100 Mbps which is good enough for me for now at least. To do better with Complete WiFi I'd need 5 or 6 discs so that I could put one in each room.
• I get a faster connection using the existing Ethernet over Powerline kit so I now have a hybrid set-up using Complete WiFi connections for mobile devices and EoP for TVs and the like that are static.

The upgrade also provided me with Hybrid Connect and, as expected, the 4G connection is rubbish - officially designated as 'poor', shown as one bar and reported at around -112dBm. I finally got around to testing it this morning when no one else was about by pulling the WAN cable from the SH2:

• It took a little while longer than I expected to fail over - but it did in the end.
• Download speed was around 30 Mbps; upload closer to 1 Mbps which is surprisingly acceptable for an emergency backup over 'unusable' 4G!
• It didn't fail back when I reconnected the WAN cable. Or, to be precise, after several minutes of it not doing so, I restarted the SH2 to recover normal service.

So, all in all, for an extra £1 pcm it seems pretty good value this time around ... 😁

[c64z86]

Cool!

One benefit of multiple discs is that they also have a dedicated channel where they communicate to one another and shuffle data around. So your speed may indeed improve on that disc by having another one in between it and the router. Not a whole lot, but it will improve.

[philip42h]

Reading your reply @c64z86 reminded me of another couple of things that I meant to check:

• I tried without any success at all to extend the network using the Ethernet port on the back of the Complete WiFi disc - though the device that I was attempting to extend to proved to be rather suspect so the test wasn't conclusive!
• As others have said elsewhere, you can use the Ethernet port on the back of the Complete WiFi disc for backhaul - just as you do when setting up the disc in the first place - and that does work ... just plug-in an Ethernet cable and the device will use that for backhaul, but ...

My powerline network gives between 500 Mbps and 1000 Mbps between nodes and a gigabit connection back to the SH2. So I assumed that connecting the Complete WiFi disc to a powerline node should give me a better than 500 Mbps connection for backhaul ... using my 'phone a few centimetres away from the disk and SpeedTest I managed a download speed of 150 Mbps with the Ethernet connection in place and 200 Mbps with the Ethernet cable removed - which wasn't quite what I expected and I don't know where the 'bottleneck' might be.

Using an Ethernet backhaul is certainly an option if you need to place a Complete WiFi disc 'further away' than the wireless will travel.

I probably should get around to adding the third disk at some point, in the interests of science, but ... 😉