What a mesh: BT Whole Home Wi-Fi users moan over update

I considered these..

As they came recommended, are sold at a relatively good priced compared to other Mesh-WIFI products but still cost £200-30).

Thankfully, whilst I was dithering with placing the order, a colleague had his Netgear Orbi blow up, I then realized that there was no resiliency and a waste of money - So in the end, I spent a little extra and brought Ubiquiti Unifi (Which is awesome btw!).

Can one really expect any better from BT? Going on the abysmal performance and poor reliability of their "home hubs" (can someone tell me why they're not called routers?), I am not surprised at all. Furthermore, I'm not surprised at the total ineptitude of their team to fix the problem in a way that makes customers feel even remotely valued.

A BT spokesperson told The Register: “We’re aware that a small number of customers have been having problems with their Whole Home Wi-Fi. We’re working to fix the issue as quickly as possible.”

Isn't it always a small number of customers

Mine fails to even notice some devices on the network. They can use the network but don't show up in any admin screens as being on the network.

Also, although it claims to have timed blocking rules, but there is no default blocking rule, so any blocked person simply changes their mac address to avoid blocks.

This is why forced updates are not always a good idea

Orange France tends to roll out Livebox updates in early August (when the world is on holiday) and if you're lucky a fix might roll out in September to counter all the things they broke.

It would be good to have an option to be prompted if the update should be applied. That way I can just skip the August nonsense.

I am a end user of the BT WholeHome disks and have three of them. The latest firmware update has made them work as expected.

Thumbs up from me.

Sophos XG Home

Run on an HP Gen8 Microserver.

I did have a problem with one of the AP's going inactive and never coming back. A recovery flash and it'd work for a while then stop.

Funnily enough when I swapped it with another, that had worked flawlessly, the "faulty" one behaved and "working" one inherited the problem.

Turned out that the PSU supplied wasn't giving out the full 12V. Enough to start the AP and run for a while but presumably once load increased it fell off.

Other than that, three AP's blanket my entire home and office at the end of the garden and throughput is enough for streaming 4k.

Very happy, given the software is free and I have to say, superb.

Absolutely second the notion of not using ISP supplied routers.

BT equipment sucks

Sorry, but all of their kit just sucks.

Remember they were boasting about how the Hub 6 was so much better than Hub 5? Here's the kicker I was given both business hubs and in terms of configuration features the Hub 6 lacked significantly in comparison to 5.

For example, on Hub 5 you could configure your own network range 192.168.x.x 10.x etc.

However Hub 6 this was limited you could set to to 10.0.1.x for example, but click apply and it would hang and revert to 192.168.1.x. They later said this was intentional due to some BT infra uses the 10.x range so they had to disable it. I called BS, and say it's a broken feature (considering the 10.x range is still shown as an option. Just doesn't work)

Static IP management was a mess also compared to 5, the new UI was sluggisb compared to 5 (which is already slow) and looked terrible.

But then there are limits compare from Home Hub to Biz Hub too!

A business hub 5 will activate and use IPv6, a home hub 5 will report IPv6 is not available. On the exact same connection.

Put bluntly BT kit sucks, if you need to build a network of some sort, go buy some proper kit don't bother with BTs stuff because it only gets worse with each generation.

Just sayin'

People choose BT gear? Since when?

I don't think I've ever had a connection in my life where I chose to use the BT equipment. My old workplaces all have a little box in the cupboard full of the "original" modems/routers and most of those were still in shrinkwrap. In fact, we only ever kept them in case BT gave us that "you must try to see if the problem is still present when using the original equipment or we won't support you" but even they aren't that stupid to insist on that any more.

You can use anything from Netgear to Cisco to Draytek, at home or at work, but who the hell (among those "in the know") doesn't just replace the BT supplied junk with something that at least works? Even on Virgin, I used to stick the SuperHub in modem mode and had either a Draytek Vigor or a Linksys WRT sitting behind it doing the real work (including wireless).

Genuine question

Whats the difference between these and a £15 TP-Link WiFi extender?

ISP hardware rental

On this side of the pond, not only are we given shit hardware by the ISP, we're charged a stiff rental fee... about $10-$15 a month.

Separates the idiots from the people able to buy a cable modem and a router/firewall.

BT = Broken Tech

Well...

...that's another fine mesh they've got their customers into!

Unhappy

I signed up to BT at the start of the year. I had my HomeHub 6 for about 2 days before it received a firmware update ... and the wifi hasn't worked since!

Happy Customer here...

I've got four of the "BT" Arcadyan WholeHome AP's - two wired, two wirelessly meshed, and they work a treat. I have Unify at one office, which works also well, and at the others some SonicPoints which work less well but still usable. I would struggle to differentiate between the WholeHome and the Unify kit as a user - the roaming is seamless.

I've got BT FTTH and scrapped the BT HH6 last month in favour of a DrayTek non-WiFi router as I didn't want BT's FON contaminating the airwaves. The ease with which BT let this happen was almost shocking, and I was totally unprepared for it having prepared for battle to retrieve my user creds!

I would love to knock BT, all the time - but recently they've ditched some of the old crappy hardware for something that's quite good. One of my WH disks has blue-lighted twice this month, the rest are all fine. My only real beef is how long it took for the HH6 to start-up, and now that's gone it isn't a problem any more. I do wonder though, why a premium ISP wouldn't just ship a premium router - like DrayTek make...

Only newfangled kit?

I'm still on a Homehub 1, and for the last few days, I keep losing connection and reconnecting again every few minutes. Coincidence?

Head of Bt customer services

If you have any problem with BT, I can quite recommend emailing Libby Barr, Head of Customer Services (whose signature you'll find at the bottom of any letter or bill from BT) and telling her to procreate elsewhere. Worked for me.

I won't share the actual address, but it's not hard to find if you're linked in. I personally feel a bit sorry for Mz Barr dealing with BTs ineptitude, but... You took the money, you made the choice.

We've got a HH5. But I use it only as a modem with the wifi switched off. It's connected to an Asus RT-N660U which does all our wifi and routing. The signal from the HH was fine, but there was just a lack of control offered in the firmware. Meanwhile the Asus does a bang up job and thankfully the HH seems not to struggle to much when asked to be merely a modem.

Mine work great!

I must fall in to the group of users who experienced no problems.

I'm really pleased with my Whole Home system, it works well and all our devices connect fine.

The only thing I've been disappointed by, and continue to be with this update, is that they don't daisy chain, which I always thought was the point!