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?

Orcvader · 20 Sep 2017 at 11:32

It's either the BT Hub 3, 5, or the latest smart hub. Is it a seperate modem and router or an all in one? The 3 is 2.4GHz only, while the 5 and smart hub also includes wireless ac.

From my experience with the HH3, it was pretty unreliable when there was too much wireless devices connected to it, most likely due to the wireless controller itself and not the wireless bands. I would be tempted to replace it with something better.

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?

Daaaavvveee · 20 Sep 2017 at 13:02

MajorMaccas said:
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?

I had the HH4 I believe, and had similar issues, just got the latest hub and no issues at all.
Not sure if its anything to do with the "Smart Channel" system they have? Have you tried separating the 2.4 & 5 signals?

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.

TheVoice · 20 Sep 2017 at 13:50

Try opting out of BT Wi-fi (the thing that lets other BT customers connect to your router on an open network), I recently moved home and for some reason, in the process BT Wi-fi was re-enabled and I started experiencing a lot of wifi issues. Finally managed to get it disabled manually because the opt-out option on the website wouldn't work, and most of my issues have since gone away.

It can take a day or two for it to take effect, and you might need to turn the router off for a few minutes and then on again for it to kick in.

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!

TheVoice · 20 Sep 2017 at 18:48

MajorMaccas said:
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!

Exactly the problem I had! I'd manually selected channels but the interference from other networks and the BT Wifi ones were having a huge impact on performance.

Fortunately I'm a BT Mobile customer so I still get the benefit of BT Wifi hotspots when I'm out anyway.

Caged · 20 Sep 2017 at 19:53

Different SSIDs broadcast from the same hub use the same channel.

DragonQ · 21 Sep 2017 at 08:28

They may just have too many devices connected. Most ISP provided routers collapse under such load, in my experience anyway. I remember just two of us being in a relative's house watching footy over WiFi (probably 3-4 devices connected) when around 6 people came back from shopping (with their smartphones of course). Immediately the connection no longer worked well enough to stream, just because of all those extra devices being connected.

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.

Caged · 21 Sep 2017 at 19:11

It was a response to:

MajorMaccas said:
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!