BT Home Hub wifi problem

MajorMaccas · 20 Sep 2017 at 11:21

My girlfriend's family has BT fibre, with the usual home hub etc. I'm not certain of the exact model.

The wifi will just stop working, still connected, but browsing facebook on phone/ipad, watching youtube, anything will just buffer for 30-60 seconds. I'm pretty handy with networking, but I cannot see any reason why this would be happening. I've locked down the channel to stop it auto switching to another (they're in a very quiet neighbourhood from a wifi perspective), so I can only think it may just be wireless capacity.

If it's a single band home hub (as most ISP supplied gear is pretty low-end), and there's 4-5 of them in the house with a phone/ipad each, a few laptops, BT vision box and probably some other things, would this result in the wifi just stopping completely for upto a minute? It never drops the connection, has strong signal etc. Any ideas?

MajorMaccas · 20 Sep 2017 at 13:01

I will have to check next time I'm over there if it's a separate modem. Any ideas for replacements? The Asus AC88U looks good, but it's a bit steep at £210, anything under £150?

MajorMaccas · 20 Sep 2017 at 13:30

I actually tried disabling the smart channel system (it's just channel hopping to a less noisy channel if you have a lot of neighbours on wifi), but since they're in a very wifi-quiet area I didn't think it would help, and it didn't. I really think it is just number of devices on the single AP. As for separating the signals, if you mean different SSID's then I haven't tried it.

At my place, I have two routers wired together at each end of the house, using different channels with all signals on the same SSID + p/w, and it works flawlessly, one Netgear router and one Asus, but they're high end gear, so I think it is just low-end gear being overwhelmed as Orcvader said he experienced.

MajorMaccas · 20 Sep 2017 at 13:57

It's something I will have to check again, but I'm pretty sure I did opt-out of that when I last looked at it. Absolutely stupid idea that, have every home hub broadcasting 4 separate networks, then in a block of flats they're all smart-channel hopping constantly finding the quietest channel!

MajorMaccas · 21 Sep 2017 at 12:39

Caged said:
Different SSIDs broadcast from the same hub use the same channel.

I think he was referring to splitting out the 2.4GHz and 5GHz SSIDs. 802.11 protocols allow both to use the same SSID and then will upgrade devices to 5GHz if they are compatible. As for using the same channel, 2.4GHz and 5GHz channels are miles apart on the spectrum.