Wi-Fi issues with Smart Hub Plus

[TuckerUK]

So I've recently joined EE from BT on 30th October on the FF 900 all-rounder package. Long story short, I've added Smart Wi-Fi Plus was sent one disc and then got a second. Then added Wi-Fi enhancer. I was with BT for years but had FF installed in February this year. Old setup with BT smart hub 2 and 2 Wi-Fi discs and 900/110 package. Apart from the odd time, my kids moaned about the Wi-Fi upstairs while gaming etc. The experience with EE now is absolutely terrible on a daily basis. I thought the upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 and compatible smart Wi-Fi discs would be an upgrade from BT. The EE app is completely broken at times the Wi-Fi is shocking in the evening compared to the time with BT. I'm slowly losing the will to live with the kids moaning so much. Like I said compared to BT the first couple of weeks with EE has been a complete nightmare. If anyone can help on here as to what to try on my end I'll be very appreciative. I appreciate that upstairs is all over Wi-Fi and not using Ethernet is an issue. But sadly we rent our house so that's out of the question. 

Setup: downstairs my gaming PC, i7 12700k RTX 4070 32 GB RAM 2.5Gbps Ethernet port. My son's PS4 Pro on Ethernet is both hardwired. No issues before EE. 

Upstairs 2 smart Wi-Fi discs one in mine and the wife's bedroom and the other in our boy's bedroom. PS5 in our room and my 16-year-old’s gaming PC in the boys. PC specs. i5 12400F RTX 3060 16GB RAM 2.5Gbps Ethernet port. I've tried Wi-Fi and ethernet to my son's gaming PC from the disc. But I'm pulling my hair out. 

Someone please help me 😩

PS Just to add I’m getting issues now with lag (Fortnite) (Rocket League) that my kids play, and speeds in the evening. 900 before the kids get home from school to 150/200 in the evening on the 900 package. Never had this issue with BT yes I would lose some speed because multiple people are using the BB. But to only get 150/200 is terrible 

[YouAreNumber6]

Wow that’s a coincidence. I had an engineer out this morning. He was on site for about the same length of time.

The only useful thing he did was to confirm that I was getting 900 to the router. When I showed him the 300mbps result from 10’ away he wasn’t interested. He did suggest the EE mesh system but not sure I see the point if the router’s that bad as the mesh still needs a WiFi backhaul. In any case EE want another £10 per month for this which I’m simply not prepared to pay.

His parting words were “they won’t guarantee anything related to WiFi speeds”

So now for the fun of trying to get out of this new contract…!!!! 

[Gonz2]

Did you resolve your issues with this? Same for me moved from BT to EE, 900 fibre. New hardware is appalling, engineer been out and said there is nothing wrong with your 'optimized' set up. However Teams and Zoom I get a constant unstable connection messages. Should NEVER have moved from BT to EE. Never had these issues with the smart hub 2. 

[TuckerUK]

@Gonz2 yes and no tbh. I had 2 smart white discs that EE sent out, and they were interfering with each other so only needed the one. EE sent out 2 guides that didn’t really do anything apart from tell me you are getting the speeds to the ONT and wasn’t bothered about helping with the WiFi in the house. I still have issues from time to time in the evenings when everyone is online in the household but I’ve given up tbh trying to figure out what the problem is. But saying that it isn’t as bad as when I first joined. Never had issues with BT on FF900 in the evenings, it just worked flawlessly and get me started on the EE app WiFi controls it’s awful the less I say the better. 

[YouAreNumber6]

I decided not to bale out of the EE contract in the end. I almost moved to Shell Energy (they had a 6 month free broadband offer) but when I phoned them to start the process was told I could only have 100Mbps..!! Go figure.
In the end they were so awful I gave up....

My experience with EE broadband since then has been mixed.

First - the app is still problematic. If I go to the "Manage" page I get "Sorry something's gone wrong". Tried reinstalling the app, still the same. Incidentally why do you have to go through the whole router setup process/pairing etc after reinstalling ?
Also I have one device which shows up as connected to the router on the EE website, but doesn't even appear in the Wifi Controls page of the app

The connection speed here is 900/100. A speed test from the router shows that I fairly consistently get this. However I still get a big drop-off in speed when a short distance away from the router in line of sight.
My Apple TV, connected via wifi, seems to buffer occasionally (never did this before on BT),  the EE WiFi calling is as bad as BT was (frequent garbled audio), and I had one weird incident last week where the router restarted itself and half the devices had to be reconnected to wifi from scratch.

Overall it just doesn't "feel" any better than the old BT SH2 with the 150 connection. Which kind of begs the question as to why I bothered migrating in the first place.....

[Monkey4899]

Yes well sort of, they sent me another smart hub plus and it seems ok 90% of the time , most days I'm getting 700ish on WiFi and some days 80ish standing in the same spot, has 4 engineer s out and all have advised me to change the router 3rd party but because I have phone I'm not sure if it's possible, I need to do some research, but tbh I need a break from it , it's drove me up the wall😭

[Zuzzy]

A few weeks old since this was active but I thought I would add my experience.  Background - I’m a network engineer (well former, but enough has stuck) so I have some understanding of this stuff.

Like others I moved from BT to EE just to get a hub that had WiFi 6 so I could get more out of the 1gb fibre I wasn’t using.  BT SH ran perfectly with 4 extender discs (don’t ask, needed 3, +1 to provide a cable drop into my office) and they worked seamlessly (mostly) for 3 years. They were just a bit slow, especially the meshing, but handled 50-60 connected devices. I run a lot of home automation and smart tvs and the like!

Almost the moment I instead the new EE kit, which was actually onto my BT subscribed line as it ought to make no difference and the kit arrived early, I had issues with Internet apparent dropouts.  Actually, watching pings, usually it wasn’t actually totally down, I would get a handful of decentl pings, a few 2-3s ping responses, some drops, and then a bit of a mixture.  A reboot usually fixed it, but very often it reoccurred within 5 mins of a reboot - you could almost see the router performance degrade.

This stabilised for a few days then happened again, then stabilised, then happened frequently. Given the router also became inaccessible at these times, I figure it was CPU related, and EE tech support agreed and sent another router. No difference.

i happen to have 4 EE extenders too due to a confusion their end. Running 4 seems to make the issues reappear more frequently than running just 2, but it still happens now periodically. I’m living with worse reception on devices and no drop link into my office for the sake of stability.

As for the app, and the reporting of what is connected to what, I see the same as others. The hub web and app configs say I have 90 connected devices, with a handful online, some have been ‘offline’ for longer than I have had the EE kit!  The extenders rarely if ever show devices attached, but they must be as they are beyond range of the main hub.  Extenders say they are all connected back to the hub, which seems unlikely given the distance they must be meshing (or if not, ought to!) with their peers.  I haven’t checked if they have decided to backhaul on 2.4 but I won’t be happy if they are!

its just driving me crazy but I object to buying Amplifi/Unifi kit or the like to replace the EE kit.

[Zuzzy]

Oh and answer about third party kit with digital voice, you can’t replace the EE hub as that must be first and connected to the ONT.  But you can turn WiFi off on the hub (and probably also dhcp if you want to do that on the new system) and connect another WiFi system to the lan ports.  You can also set that new system to be a router and live with double NAT, setting the new system wan port as the DMZ IP on the EE firewall.

i only got the EE hub for the DV but then they didn’t enable it, I didn’t notice, and figured that since I didn’t realise we didn’t have a landline for so long we probably didn’t need it!

[Zaphod79]

I'm only on fttc so download about 50mbps, same as before I switched from bt to ee in November but everything else is so much worse. I went from smart hub 2 and 3 discs plus a couple of bt powerline plugs with no problems to smart hub plus with 3 discs and now 4 powerline and the WiFi is allover the place. My phone used to see up to 900 on 5ghz near the router but now 200 to 400 but signal is dropping g out allover the place. Kids moaning constantly and have started using mobile data in the house and running ipads off phone hotspot! 

In nearly 2 months they still can't link my broadband acct to my mobile account so I still don't even know my broadband acct number or see a bill. WiFi extenders always show nothing connected but who knows if that's true. Ee home app will not recognise that I'm connected to the network so that does literally nothing. I can only manage the hub via WiFi settings on my phone but that doesn't tell me much. I wish I'd never switched. I'll call them again today but after everyone else's comments I don't hold out much hope even if they send someone out. How can it be so much worse!

[Zaphod79]

Oh, and despite being connected this whole time, the ee home app wants me to set up the router again? Except the only way it will attempt that is to have me aim my camera at the back of the router and then it won't recognise anything. Same app won't believe I'm already connected. Zero out of ten. 

[YouAreNumber6]

Fundamentally I don’t think the router is that great.  Nobody here is complaining that they’re not getting their allotted upload/download speeds, but EE need to remember that people mostly perceive how good their service is by the connection speed and network reliability they get within their homes.

i hope they sort this out soon - hopefully future firmware upgrades may resolve some of these issues. In the meantime, it seems to be a case of living with it. As for the app, no excuses. This is still really unreliable, buggy etc. They should also have expected customers would want to combine their mobile/broadband accounts, which I’m being told they still can’t do…..

Going back to the WiFi side of things, I recently tested a 3rd party TP Link WiFi 6 router here. Much more stable, and connection speeds faster in all parts of the house. But of course going down this route ain’t cheap……and probably won’t work for digital voice (not sure about WiFi Calling)