BT Infinity Poor Wireless Range

martindow

A friend who had BT broadband was offered an upgrade to Infinity. Her Mac in the back room which used to connect fine now is right on the limit of wireless range and frequently loses its connection to the router at the front of the house.

BT offered IT Crowd-style advice to turn it off and on again and said it should settle down and improve after a few days (which it hasn't).

Is she likely to get anywhere with BT who have replaced a perfectly functioning system with something inferior?

If BT wash their hands of the problem, what is the best way to increase the range?

Thanks for any help.

tower

Hi, I use power-line adopters, you can get them from Amazon for about £25. They use your socket ring main and are very good...

System

Good luck with BT. If you watch their ads then they have got themselves confused between wireless performance and DSL performance.

kwikbreaks

SFAIK the BT Hub gets few complaints about wireless performance and BT were recently pushing it as a high performer in their adverts so if it were poor there would have been a flood of comments for sure.

So - it was working well and isn't now - this is going to be down to a change of position of the hub and/or channel change to one that is subject to interference from neighbouring APs.

Position - experiment
Channel - as this is a Mac InSSIDer won't work so it's probably suck it and see. Check channels 1, 6, and 11 to see if one works OK. The other channels are not discrete and overlap on those 3 so only play with them if desperate.

The chance are that long range WiFi won't deliver the speed that fibre is capable of providing anyway so to make the upgrade worthwhile having it's probably best to go with the homeplug power-line adapters suggestion anyway.

martindow

kwikbreaks wrote: »

So - it was working well and isn't now - this is going to be down to a change of position of the hub and/or channel change to one that is subject to interference from neighbouring APs.

Sorry, my post was confusing. The previous router worked well but the new Infinity router has never worked properly.

Thank you everyone for your replies. I'm inclined to give up on BT - phoning them is a nightmare and their agents are not always very knowledgeable.

I think I might get some power-line adapters.

JJ_Egan

Can you not use your old router in place of the BT one .

jje

kwikbreaks

martindow wrote: »

Sorry, my post was confusing. The previous router worked well but the new Infinity router has never worked properly.

I knew that a new BT Hub would have been supplied and as I said sfaik it has never had complaints made about WiFi range (unlike the VM Superhub). This was why I suggested the problem will probably be location or channel. I suppose it could be a faulty Hub but I think that's unlikely.

JJ_Egan wrote: »

Can you not use your old router in place of the BT one

If that was a BT Hub too certainly but if not most ADSL routers don't support external VDSL modems.

nsdlil

Dear Martindow ,
Last year I swapped from BT Broadband Unlimited to BT Infinity with it's new router and separate 'phone line . The wifi was horrendous , constantly 'dropping' and after a couple of month's complaints , multiple engineer's visits and reference to the BT Care forum (which seems to be run from N. I.) BT agreed to reinstall BT Broadband without charge , and it's been perfect again ever since . Looking at the advertisements it looks like they have brought in a new dual channel router (BT Home Hub 3) to try to reduce wifi interference , but if you're in a block of flats with many other BT Infinity users my experience suggests it's a bit of a lottery ,

martindow

JJ_Egan wrote: »

Can you not use your old router in place of the BT one .

jje

I think the engineer took away the equipment they replaced - it had been supplied by BT originally. In any case the BT box on the wall has had a new piece fitted as the plug on the new router is different from the old one.

JJ_Egan

Sorry forgot you moved to Fibre .
In advance of my upgrade to Fibre via Plus Net i have bought a new router as reports of the supplied one are its not that good .

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004TPWRSK/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&seller=

bod1467

I'm waiting on Infinity being installed. (BT are not covering themselves in glory at the moment. The HomeHub4 was supplied quickly, but they're being incompetent idiots in creating - then cancelling - the engineer appointments ... plural because I'm on my 3rd messed-up appointment).

The HH4 is supposed to be decent as regards wifi. The standard config is for "smart" wifi where it hops between channels 1, 6 and 11 to provide the best signal. Alternatively you can set it up manually to whichever is the optimum wifi channel.