Wifi Issues

[robotnik]

Hi,

Does anyone else have issues with their wifi connection at home? 

TL;DR - anyone got suggestions for a third party wifi 6 replacement for the BT hub that offers usable performance?

Despite my line speed to home being 900Mbps my BT wifi hub is often incapable of sending much more that about 15Mbps to my laptop (which is capable of wifi 6 speeds - I am assuming the BT hub isn't). If I reboot the hub I can get around 450Mbps but I need to do this too often to be practical. The speed drops quickly back to be too slow to use for work - down to 10 - 15Mbps.

BT have already charged me more for a disc which does nothing to help and, in fact, I think I am being charged more monthly for this piece of hardware that offers absolutely no improvement.

I've run a 30ft ethernet cable from the box the fibre comes into so I could move the hub as near as possible to where I work (it is 3ft away from my laptop). The cable is rated for 5Gbps over 100 metres so this is not the bottleneck - in fact if I plug my laptop into the hub using another ethernet cable I see the full speed of my connection (which is actually fine and what I am paying for).

I have tried turning on and off 2.5 and 5GHz wifi settings on the hub, scanning for different channels: nothing improves the performance.

So the issue appears to be the hub's wifi capabilities.

I wouldn't normally post a complaint publicly, but if I try to do so on the BT website I just see a red banner showing:

"Error - There seems to be a network issue.

Please wait for few minutes and try again."

Whose network issue this is, I don't know (I see this whilst the laptop is plugged in with an ethernet cable to the hub and am getting normal line speed to it).

The BT mobile app (iPhone) no longer works - it used to show my line speed, now just errors out.

Using the website to diagnose a problem just reboots my hub, after which all is ok for about an hour or so - I can do this myself easily enough, I just can't really spend 

So, really the question is if anyone else has this problem have you been able to either get a replacement hub, or better still, found any third party hardware that one can buy and set up to use what is a good connection being stymied by what seems to be substandard hardware?

I'd try a different provider but am stuck in a contract with BT and, as they offered the fastest broadband where I live I had to go with what they offered. 

Any advice would be great. Not really getting any help from BT themselves (it seems extremely difficult to register any sort of complaint with them).

Thanks for reading.

[robotnik]

.

[richrarobi]

Don't confuse wifi with broadband (Although I know BT do this)..

Wifi is your in-house radio network, NOT the copper/ fibre (or  5G / 4g)  "cable" to the outside world.

Wifi is not fast.You are looking at 5.5 mbits/s per second for wifi - (check this)

If you need speed, you need a Gigabit cabled LAN to your router

Put the broadband router where it works best.

Get a twisted pair LAN switch (Netgear Switch) and run your 30 ft (max 100ft if I remember correctly) cable to that from your router. (Gigabit LAN) - I assume your BT box does have network RJ45 ports.

If your laptop has a rj45 socket, you can run a short cable from your laptop to your new gigabit switch (NO WIFI)

You can plug other 'puters into the gigabit switch (I have raspberry pi's talking to each other)

If you don't have other 'puters, you can Gigabit cable from laptop RJ45 to router RJ45.....then you don't need the switch (although they are fun) (if your laptop doesnt have a RJ45, then get a RJ45 LAN dongle that goes into USB (pref USB3)

[naylor2006]

Its quite rare that one WIFI source in a normal residential house will cover the property, the further you move away the worse the speed will get, then you have other things to consider like interference, wall thickness/material and so on.

Apologises to anyone reading this reply and sees me repeating myself but you need more than one WIFI source and the additional source needs connecting back to the internet router with ethernet, pretty sure those BT Discs have an ethernet port on the back, if you connect this back to the router then you will get a far better 'repeated' WIFI service.

A replacement router alone will not help much, sure you can get one with massive antennas boasting long range but really it wont help much beyond the BT Hub. What you need is WIFI repeated strategically around the house, you can do this with MESH by buying a MESH wifi setup which will consist of 2 or more WIFI access points that will effectively daisy chain your WIFI...but bear in mind MESH uses WIFI to daisy chain, so again each jump between each AP will degrade throughput (speed). So you could be right next to a MESH'd WIFI access point and your client device is getting brilliant signal but the actual signal the MESH is providing has degraded through its own journey.

MESH is great but whats even better is multiple Access Points all serving the same wifi network and those access points are all connected back to the router with ethernet. This means every WIFI access point will have access to the maximum available throughput and generally this would always be my primary recommendation. Just bare in mind to get 900Mbps over WIFI is very difficult, 400Mbps-500Mbps is more realistic generally. To get towards 900Mbps with WIFI you will need to utilise 80Mhz which bonds 4 channels (eg 36,40,44,48) which allows far more interference, I have no idea what the BTHub is using, probably 40Mhz which is suitable for most applications. But I guess this beyond the scope of your question for now.

Changing just the BT Home Hub thing wont do much however connecting your long ethernet cable to the BT disc they have sent you and have that near your laptop should drastically improve things. Seems strange that speeds drop after a reboot, that could be interference on the 5Ghz band causing that, most channels are congested.

But ultimately either you go crazy like me and install Unifi Access points everywhere and have fun with a project like that or you start a little more straight forward getting TP Link DECO's or something. Switch off the WIFI on your homehub, connect one TP Link DECO to the router via ethernet then you position the others accordingly for best coverage, the setup guide walks you through all that. You may find the DECO's give you a bit more feedback so you can alter the config/channels to best suit your home. The DECO will then be your WIFI network and the BTHomeHub will just be the router.

I mention DECO cause I have friends who use them which solved issues for them, you can also keep adding them but too many will cause a different issue.

In summary, dont use the BT WIFI, switch it off entirely and buy some other WIFI solution with 3 access points, that is of course the laptop doesnt have WIFI issues and is the cause of all this.

[imjolly]

@robotnik 

this is from a previous posts which gives some idea of expected and possible speeds

https://community.bt.com/t5/BT-Fibre-broadband/FTTP/m-p/2303599#M347829