News: 1584522909

"Implausibly, BT also claimed to have boosted download speeds from 6Mbps to 100Mbps+ on average during testing."

It's fairly, but not entirely, implausible. I just put a mesh network (for that is all that this is) in my house, and 1) it reaches every room of my house now (as I put the disc-shaped objects in good places) and 2) I get massively improved speeds. For example, in my study, far away from my original router, I now get 109.3 Mbps using the network, as tested two minutes ago. Note that disc 1 of the mesh network is plugged directly into the router via cat6, so the (Virgin Media) WiFi is not used at any point.

"...It's fairly, but not entirely, implausible. I just put a mesh network (for that is all that this is) in my house, and 1) it reaches every room of my house now (as I put the disc-shaped objects in good places) and 2) I get massively improved speeds. For example, in my study, far away from my original router, I now get 109.3 Mbps using the network, as tested two minutes ago. Note that disc 1 of the mesh network is plugged directly into the router via cat6, so the (Virgin Media) WiFi is not used at any point...."

Personally, I prefer not to use any ISP provided equipment and to that extent I run a Sophos XG and use three AP55 access points.

The three give full coverage including the garden and the office in it. Anything that can use 5GHz tends to get the full 60'ish Mbps of the fibre.

Any two of them could actually provide the same coverage.

It handles all the PPPoE as well - interestingly when I first made the move (I'd had to stick with the original, truly awful, BT business business hub 3 for a good long while because of how BT did their static IP assignments) the connection speed jumped by around 15%.

When I moved ISP, it was a simple matter to update the PPPoE settings and keep all my other settings intact.

Yeah. I put my verminmedia box into modem mode and run everything through a cloud managed switch with PoE to three wireless APs covering the lower part of the house, the upper part of the house and the garden (you can get some lovely waterproof outdoor WAPs nowadays, or even marine-grade aerials and separate WAPs to put somewhere less weathery). Victorian terrace with solid walls and laminate flooring (foil backed insulation underneath it all!)

You're obviously not the target market for this, though. This is supposed to be a plug and play product for people who don't have the technical skills to set up something "better".

How are they supposed to exercise these skills if they are never told of the 'better' options ?

I'd love to know why someone who just wants the TV and laptop to work is going to be teaching themselves the finer points of networking, buying expensive equipment and wiring their house to support it. Especially when the additional cost and hassle doesn't actually translate into a meaningful improvement for those applications.

I get that this is a site where IT people congregate (I'm one of them) - perhaps those who are upvoting comments like yours need to take stock of the real world.

Same here. Mesh. Got three Tenda MW6 cubes (a shade over 100 quid), lobotomised the ISP router and plugged 'em in.

Perfect signal everywhere and for bonus points, 2.4 and 5ghz devices work in parallel for the first time ever.

I've just sent my Tenda boxes back because I had to restart all of them manually once a week or so when the speed dropped to less than 0.2mbps.

I had a few of those.

Swapped the firmware for [1]Tomato as I didn't trust it after getting my hands on them. Still don't trust that even with the firmware replaced it's not been backdoored in some way. Now sat vegetating in a box somewhere in the graveyard of tech under my bed.

[1] https://advancedtomato.com

I wasn’t aware BT offered anything faster than VDSL, in which case streaming over 100Mbit/s is extremely implausible given the standard speed ceilings for that technology.

They've offered 330Mbit over fibre to the premises for a few years to a select but growing few, and up to 330Mbit on G.fast for a couple of years as well.

I fitted a TP-Link beam shaping Access Point to replace a standard router and access point set. Speed and coverage went from 8meg with poor coverage to 70meg with full coverage.

A beam shaping Access Point is far better than a WiFi booster. It focuses itself towards the station drastically increasing power and sensitivity.

An ISP making claims of performance that couldn't be verified/live up to the hype?

Backhaul is still over the wireless waves, the more users the worse it gets for everyone. I'm running a MikroTik router (RB4011) and a PoE switch to power a couple of MT wireless access points and using their CAPsMAN to control the whole thing, including a guest and "idiot of things" virtual SSIDs on their own VLANs. Even using powerline to run more access points would be preferable to WiFi repeaters.

Given how widespread internet access is, why arent modern houses built with cat6 cabling and consideration for the optimal access point location(s)?

I rewired my older house and ran cat6 under the floors.

I've just bought my 1960s built house and am running powerline to connect APs at the moment but I've got to replace the central heating system (the lot!) so will take the opportunity to run some cat6a around the place while the floors are up.

Mikrotik have a meshing system that uses an additional 5GHz radio to handle backhaul between devices, leaving the main 2.4 and 5 free for clients. I'm sure the other meshing stuff on the market use something similar, MikroTik are just quite open about it and allow their hardware to be completely re-configured if you want to.

Some new builds down the road from where I lived nearly 20 years ago were networked end to end. Now, it probably all needs replacing as it will be out of date. Given how most households are quite happy with wifi, cabling is a waste of money for most people.

BT. True to Phorm

The comments here alone demonstrate that BT is overly exaggerating once again. WFi extenders have existed since the Internet came into our homes. BT is far from being the only company creating such equipment.

On the other hand, it seems that BT doesn't have the requisite experience to make a good product, unlike many other vendors who've gotten the tech down pat since last millennium.

Who'd've thought ? Oh, everybody. I see.

A matter or wording.

"Only we guarantee Wi-Fi in every room" is not the same as "Only We have the tech for wifi in every room"

Just offer 20 quid back, and only you have a guarantee, Weasel Ads ltd.

"WFi extenders have existed since the Internet came into our home"

This makes me feel old as the internet first came into my home via a 14.4k modem. WiFi would have sounded like black magic back then.

You're not that old, I started with a 2400 modem.

2400? 2400? My first modem was a 300 baud beast... 300 baud on a good line, 120 on a bad one (and back in those days bad lines were mmore common than not).

It might have been slow but it would connect on lines that the more modern(at the time) 1200 baud devices wouldn't (even if set by switch to 300 baud)

/me wipes away a nostalgic tear remembering happier, SARS-CoV-2 free, times

300 baud acoustic coupler!

Now I do feel old!

Luxury when I were lad we used homing pigeons according to https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549 and though ourselves lucky.

At least you had 1s and 0s. We had to make do with just 1s.

(with thanks to Dilbert)

luxury. we had carrier pigeons.

"WiFi would have sounded like black magic back then."

I actually INSTALLED a number of 1.6Mb/s (what would become 802.11 - not 802.11b) rangelan devices - did you ever wonder where the channeling came from - they wouldn't interfere with each other.

You really don't want to know how much they cost (For that matter my first 14k4 modem's price was 4 figures...)

We started using wifi last millennium! I remember being at a trade fair, we were running Nortel kit with a similar 1mbs speed, even Apple weren't wireless back then!!!

If I remember it was somewhere around £1.2k for the pcmcia card, the access point was a similar amount and also needed It's own pcmcia card!

It was magic sharing a dial up modem over wireless at home though!!!

I worked on WaveLan at NCR in Nieuwegein, Utrecht, Holland, back in the early 90s. That was fun and interesting. The very first WiFi boards I believe. The customer was Barclays Bank, I think, who wanted networking in their stone buildings without having to drill holes. I wrote software to test them to get the MTBF statistics. Pascal and assembler on NCR PCs.

Of course the BT disk system is mesh not extender so it's a lot more convenient for the user. Although it's not quite like other mesh systems because the hub is part of the mesh so you might need only one extra item. They sent me the special hub plus disk to say sorry, after they had sent the wrong powerline extenders three times in a row. (The cock-up was pretty typical BT, I've found their support system extremely willing - but their organisation is obviously very dysfunctional.)

The disk setup works superbly. I have had several goes at powerline systems and they were unreliable and far worse than the disk even when they worked.

The hub is not so controllable for the user as many readers here would want. But it's not aimed at you.

I have also used an acoustic modem and watched text appear on screen at the speed of a slow typist, but I am not particularly proud of it. Just another thing that comes with being quite old.

The ASA has told them a million times to stop exaggerating.

I use both BT Wholehome and Tenda Mesh WiFi systems at home and various relatives, generally into a Draytek router. As much as everyone loves to hate BT the Wholehome product is probably one of the best products they have ever stuck their brand on, and in my house where the single router/AP was dire, the four discs we have give us seamless coverage even into the garden. The devices that surprised me were the Tenda "cheap" MW6 - this is an excellent product for the price and works brilliantly.

What is a little surprising is that the regulator could not justify that the BT Wholehome system was any better than any other offering (which seems to infer a single router/AP from VM, TalkTalk, etc.). This is total tosh as anyone who's installed a mesh or wired roaming WiFi network will attest.

You can have an upvote from me. Been through many many routers, extenders, access points and powerline adapters over the past many years. Netgears, Drayteks, ISPs, TP-Links, etc... Moved house and succumbed to the WholeHome 3-disc bundle just to try mesh as the new place was too big with thick walls and I was going to need to buy new kit anyway.

Been one of the best purchases I've made. Five of us in the house, one virgin router in the living room plugged straight to the first disc, second in the hallway and third on the upstairs landing and the entire place is covered. Had a few initial problems with earlier firmware but has been totally solid for the last 6+ months. Think I've had to reboot 1 disc once and nobody is complaining about speeds or accidental disconnections and eating up their data plans by accident. It just works. If I did want a performance boost I could wire the backhaul, but it's been totally unnecessary, even with 3 kids regularly streaming netflix / iplayer etc..

I don't care if you can implement it all with a mixture of repeaters and access points and tweaking this that and the other to get a couple more Mb. I care that it works out of the box, life's too short to be spending evenings poking settings and nobody is moaning at me about speed and connectivity.

These repeaters work by consuming twice as much of the wireless spectrum, causing even more congestion for those around you... Wired backhaul combined with localised low power access points would be far more considerate to your neighbours.

I got those Tenda MW6 and a triple pack of MW3s on an Amazon deala few months ago. I cannot for the life of me get the 3s to pair with the 6 as the primary node.

Very frustrating as the 6 has a gig port and the 3s don't. I have tried everything and the online advice is rubbish. Have you had this problem

A down vote for positng a question?!

This place.... WTF man. You didn't even attempt to reply.

I don't think anyone minds a question, but the punctuation error was unforgivable.

To get the MW3 and MW6 to work, just pair them with the MW3 as the primary node then plug the MW6 to the router. As soon as you turn off the MW3s the MW6 becomes primary. Having said that, when I did this the whole network of them needed restarting once a week or so due to speed dropping down to under 0.2mbps.

I have a terrible Vodafone supplied router (the fibre service itself is very good) so I bought the BT Whole Home discs and had them all connected via cable back to the router and my wifi is both rock solid and with good coverage. My home is not large but still required 3 for good coverage (including the bedroom in the loft) but they are reliable and worked out of the box. A pretty decent product from BT.

We just ditched Vodafone. Their routers are amazing, they last about six months on average. I just took a big bag of the ones we killed to the recycling centre.

(I wanted to just buy a good router and swap it in but the person whose name is on the bill wouldn't let me.)

Ha, we hit this at work a few years ago.

Through various acquisitions, Vodamoan had ended up as the supplier of our leased line internet service - had started as Norweb Telecom, then Yourcomm, then someone else who's name I don't recall, then CLueless and Witless, and then Vodamoan. At each acquisition, knowledge was lost and service got worse. Anyway, Vodamoan told us that they were getting rid of that part of the legacy network - and no we can't transfer the public IPs to any other service with them (we had a /24 block running public hosting).

Anyway, as we worked through the process of shifting services off that line, one thing we did was get VDSL lines in for several other businesses in the park who we'd split our connection with - and the boss decided to go with Vodamoan due to a deal they were offering in return for all the disruption they were causing us. Vodamoan were just getting back into the DSL market back then.

We (the techies) weren't aware of the "you can only use our kit" rule until we asked for the PPPoE details for connecting customers' existing equipment to the new lines - you know, the sort of "proper" router that sensible customers use, with proper firewalls, proper port/address forwarding, VPN support, etc, etc. Initially Vodamoan just referred us to the contract terms - until we made enough noise with the account manager and they relented (no public change of policy, just allowed us to have the details). Oh yes, and they had a wonderful policy that you cannot (for any amount of money) have a static IP on the PPPoE connection - if you want a static IP, then you have to pay them for a /27 which is then routed via the dynamic IP. Another cost that didn't crawl out of the woodwork until we were into the "switch customers over" phase.

This wasn't the end of it though - between them and OpenRetch, they really screwed up several of the installs. When I say screwed up, it was something like a year before I was made redundant and Vodamoan still hadn't got one of the lines working. By contrast (for what resilience we could achieve) we took a line with another provider, the same OpenRetch problem occurred, but the other provider got it sorted in a couple of weeks - had to cancel and re-order the line (due to a numbering problem with their provider), and then cancel and re-order the VDSL service, but they got it sorted where Vodamoan still seemed unable to grasp that there was a problem to be sorted !

The problem BTW is that the building has cables coming in from two green boxes - some go to some units, others go to other units. So for a new line install, it's a bit of pot luck whether you get the right cabinet based on an address search when OpenRetch are doing the route planning. Not too bad for a phone line as the OpenRetch engineer could manage a re-provision via the correct green box - giving dial tone. But thanks to OfCon rules, he couldn't do anything with the VDSL service which was now provisioned on an inactive line in the wrong green box. It had to go back to the provider to order a "cease and re-provide", invoking another couple of weeks waiting time for the VDSL order to reach the top of the queue - unless you know that OpenRetch could do an expedited provide in these cases without charging for it, and guess what Vodamoan apparently didn't know !

Ha, we hit this at work a few years ago.

Nothing like as bad as yours but i had issues whilst setting up a retail premises. There's a telecoms company I won't name who were appalling. They get bad reviews on the internet which I read thoroughly once on the project. Had I been around before the contract was 'signed' it wouldn't have gone ahead. What said telecommunications firm were asked was could they install three PSTN lines plus one DSL line? Yes they say they could ignoring the fact that BT/Openreach (can't remember which it would have been as I can't remember the date) would be doing it. We'll also need a PBX as there will be a need to transfer calls between extensions. They say they have a clever virtual way of doing that and no need for a physical box etc. Sadly the manager who signed up to this had no technical experience at all.

So I'm brought in directly after my holiday to look at the situation regarding this and till points etc. before the shop opens. The company was very prompt at getting the bills sent out sadly not at customer service or satisfaction. I discovered that the three PSTN lines have been wired up one on each floor. So the initial call would be on line one which always came in to the ground floor. The first thing I did was ask how the calls were supposed to be transferred. It was an NGN and I'm told that if one line is busy the caller is transferred to the next line which will then ring. I said that's not a replacement for a PBX and they said it's not meant to be. So if a particular salesperson is needed and they're on the 2nd floor when the call was answered on the ground floor what happens then? Shouting or word of mouth seemed their best solution to that.

There were mysterious charges on the bill that I could never get removed no matter who I spoke to. For example there was a charge for an antivirus package on our data line which did't appear to do anything. There were others that had been agreed to by the person who 'signed' the contract. When I asked to see the signed contract I was told it was verbal and they had a recording of it. When I asked to hear it I was told their equipment didn't allow them to do this - Sorry. They insisted they had powerful broadband which was true but sadly dismal equipment. Their modem/router was a the same as an ISP supplied for homeuse. It didn't penetrate through reinforced concrete very well and was useless except on the ground floor. So I went with powerline to reach the upper floors and a wifi point connected to that up there. I asked for the username/password one day so I could check the settings and change the wifi password. I wasn't going to get that from them apparently so I googled it. They hadn't changed it from the default which was nice and insecure.

Then after opening they phoned up one day and spoke to the cleaner who was convinced that signing up to a call package would be a money saver. At over £50 when the calls were mostly incoming that was a bit rich. So I complained that an authorised person hadn't made the changes and we'd be cancelling our direct debit and taking legal advice if it wasn't removed. As soon as the contract was up we told them to bugger off

BT.

Beyond Truth.

Most excellent. It's up there with "utter cockwomble"...

Don't forget twatdangle.

Shitcunt ftw though

You remember the episode of Deep Space Nine where chief O'Brian is convinced the stations Cardassian computer has an attitude and doesn't like him. BT hubs are exactly the same when you try to tinker with them.

I have them (3), and I can now use the Internet in a downstairs room I never used to, and can use my nintendo switch in the attic room.

I don't buy that their hub will help much but the discs are just a Mesh Wifi setup. With enough discs I don't see how the claim isn't reasonable (we have 3 in a 3-storey sprawling Victorian house with all internal walls made of brick and it works everywhere, though disc #4 would be better).

Now there are issues with the discs - sometimes one will stop working properly - but that's a separate issue.