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 

[Zuzzy]

DV will work if the SH+ is the device connected to the line/ONT (and only this way).

I'm trying the opposite, given I don’t have a 500 quid WiFi 6 mesh lying around but I do have an old Ubiquiti Edgerouter I’m going to use that to connect to the ONT and just use the SH+ and extenders for WiFi and see if that stabilises things. Reasoning is that I think that the router software of the SH+ is the issue here, on the assumption that the WiFi radios and meshing is probably on chip and bought in. I might  be wrong and the extenders are having issues due to using the 2.4 and 5 spectrums for backhaul (meshes are intrinsically awful technologies by design as they use the bandwidth for clients to mesh together this degrading the client experience by design, they should always be a last resort over wiring your extenders up to the hub) but given the SH+ becomes unresponsive whenever I have an issue I’m wondering if this will help.

No DV this way but Edgerouters are very cool and give way more insight and far better choices (not for the faint hearted to configure though) and an old ERLite3 is about 50 quid these days…let’s see

[XRaySpeX]

@YouAreNumber6 : WiFi Calling from a mobile works over any BB & router.

[Zaphod79]

I've connected the TV, ps5 and network streamer in the lounge,  tv and ps4 in daughters room and pc and upstairs wifi extender via gigabit bt powerline so the only things using WiFi are phones, alexa devices and light bubs really,  and this system still can't cope.....

[Monkey4899]

I feel your pain, I've had the same thing where the camera app can't get the router, I had another engineer out and basically he said stop doing speeds tests and just use it, which was a great help, NOT

[YouAreNumber6]

I'm sick to the back teeth of this useless piece of c**p router.  Locked up again tonight - third time this has happened. 
Unable to connect to the router interface via the mobile app, so tried cabled connection from laptop - unable to ping I/f 192.168.1.254. So basically unable to diagnose why this thing is not allowing connections.
Reset router, but the log only shows events since it was reset !! What the **** is the point of that ? The log is completely useless anyway as it only seems to show devices connecting, but there also needs to be a history display !!

I'm on the phone to EE tomorrow for a new router, and if it happens with that one I'm jacking this service and moving to another provider that can actually give me  a reliable wifi connection.

[Zuzzy]

I got a new one and it’s the same. I get the same. I’m having a protracted argument with support on twitter about it

i tried my own router and just using SH+ as WiFi (DHCP off) and it was faultless. Well until suddenly devices started getting a rogue dhcp reply - I put new router as .1 and devices got .1 As gateway but started to get .254 as dns which can’t have come from my new router. It started a good 12-18 hours after I did the swap and started to affect more devices as time went on. Undeterred I added .254 as a secondary ip on my router and changed the SH to another address. Everything started working happily for about 10 minutes after which time the WiFi ceased to pass some, then all, traffic to the router. The SH totally hated its new ip and the mesh collapsed. Interestingly the BT SH2 did the same when I changed its IP once.

Beaten, I went to put everything back as was before the change and the SH just would not respond to change IP or DHCP for ages, then when it did it crashed and never recovered. Factory reset later and reconnect extenders using WPS and system back up but have had wildly varied pings and WiFi issues all day since.

trying to get money for extenders back off ee and have bought an Eero system off eBay today as it’s one grief I just don’t need. But will get an engineer first and take them to task before I concede the 240 quid for the extenders subscription …

[Monkey4899]

My advise is to log a written complaint via EE website as they seem to take it a little bit more serious, I just bullet pointed every problem from speed to the app and all the lies I was told.. good luck 🤞

[Zuzzy]

My Mac is connected to an extender and I ran this ping plot today to 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare-not perfect to use, but ping generally isn’t perfect, but pretty robust and consistent-good enough to get an idea of a link) and the quality of the connection to the router itself and onwards to cloudflare was awful. Don’t think this fact helps anyone per de, but sharing out of interest. The y scale goes from 0ms to ~2 seconds, x I think was 15 minutes of time. Top graph is to router, bottom to 1.1.1.  FWIW concurrent Speed test gave me about 48mb down.

Connected later to the router on my phone, pings to  1.1.1.1 sat at around 20ms without much change and dl speed was 740mb. 🤬

 

[Zuzzy]

So that was an interesting week. I got all the evidence I could over to the support guys and they insisted on an engineer visit. As it happens the engineer was one of those really rare geeky experts who looked at my screenshots and talked about what was wrong, and to my surprise completely agreed that the extenders (which, by the way, do not mesh contrary to the website) were not working properly, and the hub is clearly underpowered. 

I got the distinct impression from all involved this was not new news to them. Immediately after EE cancelled my extender 12m contract and refunded me the money spent so far.

While that’s interesting, what was far more surprising was that I replaced the EE kit with Eero, and lots of things in the house started to work properly. My work conference calls haven’t dropped since the swap, after dropping every 15 minutes before. My work laptop vpn stays connected. Bizarrely it also now downloads patches when it didn’t before.

The EE kit wasn’t bad on speed, but the latency was just all over the place, and it’s that jitter that was just killing all my online kit.

I was also stunned quite how much interference the EE kit caused Eero. While still on, Eero really struggled to get any bandwidth. Off and Eero sprung to life!

[YouAreNumber6]

I’ve been having continual lock-ups on the EE router. Not often - but when it happens it seems to be while watching Apple TV (over WiFi). No option other than a reboot to get it working again and of course nothing appears in the logs as these are wiped after restarting!
I’ve now been sent a replacement router to test which I intend to try today.

Perhaps EE should have offered a no-frills connection-only service to those not requiring digital voice etc and allowed customers to use their own equipment (unsupported of course). I imagine that we are “paying” for the EE router anyway (which we actually don’t own) and if I had the choice I’d much rather pay a lower monthly cost and use my own kit.