Smart Hub SH31B needing regular power cycles to maintain connection

[Mozza76]

We've been with EE full fibre with the back-up hybrid connect 4G router system for around 4 months and while the service is good when the router's connected, it feels clunky to have to manually restart the Smart Hub router every couple of weeks to reconnect to the service after the connection is dropped.

I know that in the greater scheme of things a weekly router reset is a small price to pay for an otherwise good service, but there does seem to be something up with the SH31B router/firmware/software. Connecting to the router's home page through a browser can be a painfully slow process, often taking 20 seconds or more to log in to the home screen, before getting a "We experienced difficulty getting the data. Could you kindly reload the page? [CHOP3-800]" error. This usually happens before it stops letting you log in entirely and forces you to power cycle it.

After a router restart this log in speeds back up to 5 seconds, doesn't get the CHOP3-800 error and everything's fine and dandy again. It's as though the longer the router stays up, the more errors it develops before it falls over again.

It would also be good if the router's error log kept all the errors BEFORE the router restart, so you can see what happened as it fell over. As it stands the log appears to be wiped after every reboot, so is as good as useless to troubleshoot from. Especially seeing as just before a reboot is needed, the router often doesn't let you log in at all, just timing out on the EE logo/spinning balls screen.

I'd swap it out with an alternative router, but we're tied into the EE smart hub because we wanted to keep our landline phone number and the 4g hybrid back up system, two services which I'm not sure third part routers would support.

Is anyone else having similar issues? 

Thanks
(The smart hub is running App 1.11.0 and firmware version: r1.29.0-R-950306-PROD-83002. My home set up is the SH31B with its WIFI capabilities switched off, and a TP link Deco system handling the wifi duties through the house, each post connected individually via ethernet to the back of the SH31B.)

[bobpullen]

How do you have DHCP configured? It should only be enabled on one of your two systems, either the EE hub, or the Deco.

[Mozza76]

Hi

The EE router is set up to handle DHCP allocation. The Deco is just set to bridge mode (or equivalent)

thanks

[Mustrum]

@Mozza76   did you mean bridge mode, or is it Access Point mode?

[Mozza76]

Sorry - I meant Access Point mode. I don't think it's doing any DHCP allocation, though. Might this be causing an issue?

This has been hovering over me as a possibility that I should set the SmartHub to handle everything, including Wifi, and just set the Deco to wifi extender mode (I think that was an option when you set it up...)

Thanks for everyone's help with this, btw...

[Mr_Farmer_Giles]

This has just happened to me for the first time today. Had an issue with Plex so tried to log in to view addresses etc and now the router is telling me nothing is connected to it (that's via desktop and the app as well). 

[monitorcurve]

I think this comes down to a memory leak within the router, as it does seem to get slower over time, things such as loading the admin page takes forever, all you see is loading circles all the time, even between pages takes forever, this shouldn't be how web apps work.

I'm also running:

App version: 1.11.0
Firmware version: r1.29.0-R-950306-PROD-83002

I don't know how regularly they role out firmware updates, but it's something that's in EEs hands to fix.

[Mozza76]

Yep. This seems to resemble my experience. In which case I think a memory leak in the router is potentially the culprit, since when the router's working I very rarely log in to the web app, but I know it's slowing down in the background since cloud apps get slower to load (my wife and I work from home) and after a couple of weeks a reboot is required to make it speed up again.

Funnily enough we got the 4G backup from EE as a preemptive strike against the outages we'd had with BT at our local exchange, but I'm not sure how effective a router that can't even keep itself connected to the main fibre connection would be at switching to the 4G supply should a major outage happen again.

[Mozza76]

The router restarts are getting to be more and more regular. Is it possible that there could be a problem with my router?

It's infuriating. I'm sure I had a similar issue with an old Plusnet router where it would just slow over the course of a week and then eventually fall over, requiring a restart.

[Ultima_IT]

I have exactly the same issue and just reboot it weekly now but it does slow down and I get the [CHOP3-800] error after a few days.