BT - fttp - hub 6 issues

danj

Hello All,

I have been in my new build for just over 2 years and fortunately/unfortunately we have FTTP which basically meant I’m stuck with BT paying £50 a month for 200mbps. (oh I miss virgin)

Anyway the internet has actually been very good, took a while for open reach to get it installed but its been problem free for almost 2 years.

The BT Hub6 is under the stairs in the centre of the house. I have 5 outputs which are nicely connected to the Lounge, kitchen and 3 bedrooms, all done by the builder so is all nicely hidden in the walls.

I have wired in as much as I can as I believe this is the best setup. Using a switch in the lounge, kitchen and bed 1 to connect all devices.

About 2 weeks ago I had issues with the internet. Everything was showing connected but nothing working. I rang BT and went through the what seemed to be hours of test with being told everything is fine and I have two much connected. (I believe I have an average amount of devices for most modern households).

When the wifi did work I was running speeds of around 1-13mbps but this was over 3 tests ran within the same minute so the wifi was all over the place. Bizarely discounted all the connections from the main router apart from the lounge and then discounting everything from the switch apart from my Mac meant that I was now running the full 200mbps expected. I then connected the tv and I was right back to where I started.

Anyway it ended with me receiving a new hub 6 which after setting up has worked perfectly, as expected a faulty hub.

Anyway its back to its same tricks this morning so im not sure what to do.

Do I have two many devices? Can the hub 6 cope or is it another faulty hub or firmware issue?

I have the following wired and wireless setup:


Lounge:

Smart TV, PS4, Sky Q box and mac mini all via a tp link switch. Google mini via wifi


Kitchen:

Smart tv, sky q mini and tp link av600 powerline via a tp link switch. Google home and sonos play 3 via wifi


Bed 1:

Smart tv, sky q mini via tp link switch


Bed 2:

Sonos play 1 via wifi


General:

2 x mobiles, 2 x ipads and 1 laptop.

Obviously not all will be in use as the same time but it gives you an idea on what’s connected.


I will call BT again later and go through the same hour of tests to then again be told that I have two many connections and everything is working as it should bla bla bla.

My concern is Ive just purchased two security cameras which I was hoping to connect up this weekend. Ive already added the powerline in the kitchen and the other end in the garage so I can POE the two cameras but im now thinking that’s two more devices. I have also bought my wife another google mini for the bedroom for her birthday this weekend so that’s 3 new devices. I was also planning an internal cam and a smart door bell to finish off the smart setup.

Is it just the hub 6 that cant cope?

I do have a linksy ea6900 I gave to a friend who is now not using it so I could try this but will this improve the situation or am I going to have to buy something better.

If you can help in anyway it would be great.

Thanks

Dan

psychopomp1

Can you try moving your HH6 out in the open and use a longer cable to connect to the ONT? Being in a new build with wafer thin walls (usually) you should find 1 AP easily covers your full home.... but it needs to be out in the open! Use your EA6900 router if you can’t move the HH6. Btw I get the full 310 Mbps on a 330/30 Openreach line over Wi-Fi in a newish build home (4bedroom) so no reason why you can’t as well

danj

thanks for the reply. Ive never had any issues with getting my full 200/20 (not paying the full wack ) and wifi around the house and to the garage which is external is excellent. I suspect that something is wrong with the router itself.

As mentioned ive had two years of bliss, the only things ive added recently are the google home and mini but all has been working for months ok. My main point was with the amount of devices connected, should the hub6 be able to cope with this?

ill see what happens when im home but if its still no good ill try the linksy.

in general would the linksy be better than the bt hub6 anyway, i remember it being well rated and costing quite a bit however that was 3 years ago so times change.

the only other thing ive thought about is BT has changed its settings so we only see one wifi rather than the split between 2.4 and 5ghz. maybe i need to split this in the settings and start connecting the googles and sonos to the 2.4 to see if this changes anything. ive also not checked to see what channels the neighbours are using to see if thats an issue.

will do more digging at home.

psychopomp1

TBH I’ve got no idea how many devices the HH6 can handle simultaneously but my router (Linksys EA9500) can easily handle 50  when loads of relatives & their gadgets are over.
Yes, if you can, split the 2 bands manually on the HH6. Call one xxxxx_2G and the other xxxxx_5G. That way you have full control over which client goes on on which band.

danj

last night I was on the phone for a good hour. The guy I spoke to was as helpful as he could be i'm sure but BT are blumin useless. So I ran through everything with him and he has had to push it to another team who will contact me within 48 hours. My wife works from home a lot so this isn't great.

Anyway i've been running my own tests, i've disconnected the powerline as that was recently installed so it was just to cross this out. I've split the bands and tried multi restarts and then a factory reset with no luck.

I have also tried a brand new hub 6 just in case and this is still happening. Could it be the openreach ont rather than the router?

I've looked at the wifi channels and all is fine however this wouldn't explain the wired connections not working either.

So my last test was a little more interesting. So i disconnected all of the ethernet cables so its only running wifi and my speeds were much improved up to 130mbps. still not where it should be but from 0-13mbps before this is a massive improvement. i then plugged in the lounge ethernet which runs to a switch connecting the TV, Sky,ps4 and mac mini. On my mac the internet is working "just" and my wifi on my phone is now at around 40-60mbps. i then plugged in the bed 1 which is only the tv and sky q mini which were actually turned off and the wifi drops right back down to no connection or around 6mbps max.

This would make me automatically think that its the router at fault but i tried a brand new one which was the same so could i be that unlucky to have another faulty router?

on way to work today i thought about replacing the cat 6 cable going from the ont to the router just incase which ill do tonight. Ill have my linksy back on friday so will also try that out but i'm really not sure what the issue could be.

any info, advice would be fantastic.

Dan

mickevh

If both wired and Wi-Fi are affected, potentially you've got something flooding your network with traffic, possibly even a "broadcast storm." For example, a device with what we (in IT) call a "jabbering" NIC (it's been decades since I'm seen one though) or something has caught some malware or a bot that's chucking out junk or the aforementioned broadcast storm.

Broadcast storms mostly occur if you create a "loop" in the topology of your network which means pretty quickly the network gets filled up with endlessly circling traffic which essentially blocks out everything else like a gridlock on the road network. Usually broadcast storms kill everything, but can manifest as erratic and slow performance. Of course the solution is to eliminate any such loop if you've got one.

It'll be a time consuming pain to do, but one way to assess whether any particular device is culpable is to disconnect (physically for wired devices, turn of Wi-Fi fr Wi-Fi devices) everything then test it all one by one.

I'd proceed by starting with the HH, check it with something (laptop would be ideal) then progressively reintroduce all the "infrastructure" components such as your switches and powerline and establish whether they are all good (which will tend to disprove a broadcast storm.)

If that proves OK, thence one by one, test all your clients. ie connect client, test it, disconnect client, rinse and repeat until you've tried them all and/or found what's culpable.

By "test" I mean run it for half a hour of so, not a couple of minutes (unless or until you've discovered any particular device that's culpable.) It can sometimes be a while before it kicks off.

It's a bit of a forlorn hope though.

Highly unlikely, but possible, is someone is "jamming" your Wi-Fi by injecting a load of "junk" traffic into it (which can the propagate onto the wires if it's broadcast) or someone nearby has hacked your Wi-Fi and is war-driving you. Testing wires only would give some indication whether these are potential issues.

I'm afraid for some issues, there's nothing for it but some methodical and forensic testing.

I've not stress tested one, but I'd be surprised if an HH6 couldn't cope with a couple of dozen devices in a SOHO use case, but it is wildly dependent on you traffic patterns and so forth and SOHO kit mostly doesn't have the facilities to let you look under the bonnet and see whats going on with (for example) CPU and RAM usage.

Many, many years ago I put up a cheap SOHO router on a  network in a college (back before everyone had laptops and smartphones) and it was fine until we had getting on for a hundred devices simultaneously online which killed it. (That was an old 10/100 non-Wi-Fi router with "only" 16MB of RAM.)

If you've got a traffic problem, then splitting Wi-Fi bands will probably make no difference. Likewise, BT may wash there hands of it as anything "wrong" with your network as it's not there responsibility. It's "your" network, even if they supplied the router and they may defer once they've proved the equipment they supplied isn't faulty and the ISP link is OK (ie "their" bit.)

neilball

You need to start from basics - disconnect all wired connections and wifi devices from the HH6 then using one trusted device to carry out tests. I’d prefer to use a wired device rather than wifi to avoid testing been skewed by wifi performance issues.

Assuming that you have no real test equipment then you may have to rely on online speedtest websites, so make sure you use the same website and same online server for your test, then test using a local patch lead to your HH6 then connect one-at-a-time and test each in-wall cable directly (not using any network switches). If the results are all similar then you can add in the remote switches one at a time with no other devices connected and retest.

If all i’d good at this stage then add one device to your switch at a time and retest - it could be that one of your devices is constantly downloading or uploading therefore saturating your broadband connection giving you the lack of performance.

It does not sound like a hardware issue on the HH6 to me, more like something in your wider network causing issues. I’m not a BT user so have no knowledge of the diagnostics available in the advanced router settings, but there may also be performance diagnostics that will show real-time throughout via IP address etc that may also help you spit if the issue is a “rogue” device that may be the issue.

I’m also assuming that your network switches are unmanaged ie have no built-in settings accessible from a web page or console, otherwise you may have mid-configured switch settings. It’s also worth checking if you have Sonos or similar devices that can operate both wired ethernet and their own wireless mesh - if a device manages to connect viabhe mesh and wired without blocking one or the other you can get a network loop that quickly causes a “broadcast storm” in the network that overloads the network with traffic (Sonos used to publish a Spanning Tree Protocol support document and equipment blacklist to help users and installers avoid such issues).

Basically it’s a case of planning and implementing a considered test routine to check and identify the combinations of equipment that cause your network to degrade without any ore-conceived ideas as to what it might be, otherwise you are just going to keep going around in circles without any real answers or remedies.

mickevh

I've just put in an HH6 for a relative and naturally had a quick sniff around it to see what it did - I'm nerd after all. IIRC there was not much there unless there's back door available, but it did have some metrics for the amount of data up/downloaded on a per-device basis. From memory, if you go into the page that shows the "map" of the network and/or the IP leases (ie list of devices) each one showed the amount of data up/downloaded - presumably this is just to/from the Internet and not local traffic. And the "status" page had the usual thing on BT kit that showed the line rate, how long it's been up, etc.

danj

thank you for the information. I will start the testing tonight and see how I get on.

as mentioned I have had my setup for a couple of years with zero issues and great speeds.

however we have added a couple of things over the last couple of months which you would automatically think they are the issues.

So both sonos have been in for ages so I doubt its a sonos issue but then again ill run a full test.

what we have added are the following:

New smart meter and the little home display. (id imagine this has zero effect but thought id mention it)
Google home hub and google mini just before the first time the network went down. (this is my currently number 1 suspects)
powerline which clones my wifi and extends (original suspect however they have been switched off for over 24 hours)

I will take a look on the bt manager and see if i can see any traffic which looks suspect with everything plugged in. Then ill run the full test.

if someone has hacked the internet then would changing my password be worth doing?

wish I had the linksy just to rule the hub out straight away.

thanks again

mickevh

If you mean your Wi-Fi passphrase (or "key" as it's popularly known) then yes. It might be worth doing so anyway just to rule out that someone else is getting access to your Wi-Fi. We should really be changing Wi-Fi keys regularly, not that anyone bothers because it's such a pain to do so.

With an HH6, you might see a "bandit" device listed in your network map if you have an "uninvited guest."

Check also that all your Wi-Fi devices have security/encryption enabled (most things tend to  by default these days) and you are not running and unencrypted and unsecured Wi-Fi.