Home wif fi solution needed.

jolt

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I have plusnet high speed fibre. I'm logged into the router and the speed coming down the line is currently 79.9 mb so it's pretty fast.

Ive had wi fi issues for a long time, mainly upstairs but the connection is never really stable anywhere in the house. It's a 1930s 3 bed semi.

Ive now tried, upgrading my package, using a booster and plusnet have sent me out a new router but I'm still having the same issues

Im sat next to the router and my phone is getting around 5mb

Wife is also sat next to the router but her phone is getting around 30mb

My sons xbox is currently getting around 10mb on the wi fi booster 5ghz extension upstairs but last week he was constantly at around 50mb, so I know the booster does work.

The Internet speed seems to constantly change. He is forever claiming his xbox is lagging. He's just got the brand new series s as well so I thought this might resolve the issue.

The network is obviously capable of getting high speeds but its not constant and seems to be very fast for a few days then very slow.

Just wondering what my options are. Seems like before investing in a pricey mesh setup Or similar I should probably just get a decent router first.

Im currently using the plusnet home hub 1, which is rubbish.
 
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I'm afraid solutions are not as simple as 'What box can I add to magically fix my WiFi performance'. In order to arrive at possible solutions, several items must be understood first...

  • Run Speedtest via a cabled Ethernet connected computer to ensure there are no broadband related issues. Line speed is often unrelated to the performance you will actually receive and serves as an indicator only.
  • The physical layout of the house, where WiFi needs to be strong, and internal structure/materials
  • WiFi survey of the house to see which foreign networks are present, especially as it's a semi.
  • Installation preparation: How much are you prepared to install a cabling infrastructure, as the best way of delivering WiFi with great performance is provide a cabled Ethernet service to the WiFi Access Points roughly in the centre of their coverage areas.
  • As an extension of this, how much are you prepared to provide cabled Ethernet to non-portable devices that can accept this? This reduces the dependency on WiFi thus increasing performance for those devices that are WiFi only or portable.
  • Do you have any budget limitations?

There are so many threads that discuss this subject already in great depth by a variety of highly experienced well-known members, so it's worth spending some time reading those to get the idea of the methods used for surveying, planning, and deployment.

If this raises some specific questions afterwards, please do present them and we'll do our best to answer.

Cheers :)
 
The Homehub isn't the best bit of kit. I use my Plusnet fibre with a BT Openreach modem & seperate router.
As Chester has listed, there are things you need to decide on. I've hard wired as much as possible, the only kit that uses wifi are phones, laptops and tablets, everything else is hard wired.
 
Our solution was to get a decent Mesh system. In our case , 3 Tp-Link Deco S9s were positioned around house. The WiFi on the plusnet router is switched off and the first Deco unit is plugged into the router. Once this is setup through the app, the other 2 units are setup using the wireless connection. Our largish 4 bedroom house now has great WiFi everywhere and no complaints from the kids in terms of lagging or dropped connections.
 
Have you checked your wifi channels. Since most connect to the 2.4Ghz freq you may find a lot of your neighbours are on the same channel. Have you split your wifi into two so you can log onto either the 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz network. You can watch this youtube video if your not sure how to do it. Looks like he is using "WiFi Analyzer by olgor.com" which you can download from Google Play. Not sure about Apple.
 
Wi-Fi is an "only one thing at a time can transmit" technology. The more things there are, the more data they need to transmit, the more competition (it's anything but fair) there is for some "air time," This can then manifest it self as variable performance on any given end station at any give time. Wi-Fi and data networking in general is "just like that." We can do things to improve the chances (as discussed) but it can never be fully deterministic. The "black art" in designing data networks is predicting how much capacity and reliability can be provided to (acceptably) meet the needs of any particular use case.
 
Our solution was to get a decent Mesh system. In our case , 3 Tp-Link Deco S9s were positioned around house. The WiFi on the plusnet router is switched off and the first Deco unit is plugged into the router. Once this is setup through the app, the other 2 units are setup using the wireless connection. Our largish 4 bedroom house now has great WiFi everywhere and no complaints from the kids in terms of lagging or dropped connections.
This is pretty much what I've done also, with the exception that I have a wired backhaul to each of the other 2 units (and unfortunatly I don't have S9s, but older m5s, but it should be the same idea).

I highly recommend a wired backhaul wherever possible, even if it ends up moving a unit one room away from the ideal location. Then all your boxes switch to "AP" mode and use the ethernet for the backchannel communication, instead of trying to use wifi to make the mesh work, which is still only as good as your wifi can get, depending on your structure and other interference.
 
I've also installed 3 S9s in an office of 30 people as a temporary measure while we get the network fully commissioned. They are sitting on a 100Mbs symmetrical business grade fibre connection and sitting 30' away from the furthest router - all linked via wireless backbone and with everyone using the network, I could still get 90Mbs. Very impressive for consumer kit and I doubt it will increase much once we get the WiFi 6 aps, gigabit switches and wired connections installed!!
 

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