Slow wifi affects even wired after a couple days

Hi there,

I've been experiencing some really strange issues with a new Hyperoptic dual-band router and was hoping to get some advice.

I've had Hyperoptic for a few years now and have been very happy. I recently upgraded to their dual-band router to get 5Ghz 802.11ac speed for faster transfers with with my NAS as well as upgrading from 100 Mbs to 150 Mbs.

A couple of days after switching to the new router I noticed YouTube was really struggling to play at high quality over WiFi on my computer and mobile devices. E.g., if I skipped forward or back in a video, it would sometimes take 5-15s to buffer enough to start playing again, when previously they�d always play pretty much immediately. I also noticed iOS app updates were horrendously slow.

I ultimately found that:

1) immediately after a reboot of the router, all would be perfect for a day or two (e.g., youtube playback and skipping forward/back were immediate and iOS app updates took seconds rather than 1+min to download)
2) after a couple days, my wifi would get into a hissy fit and I'd start seeing the above issues
3) when the issues present themselves, I could easily replicate this:

a) start iOS update of an app around 100 MB - it would go very slow ~1min
b) at this time, run a ping from a device wired to the router to news.bbc.co.uk, 800-1000+ response time, lots of pack loss, other devices would start getting timeouts if browsing
c) reboot router, all perfect - the app would download in seconds, I could stream YouTube from different devices at the same time with no buffering issues

Strangely, when the router is in this mood, I can still run a speedtest from the device over wifi and it shows 150+ Mbs up and down.

I've had Hyperoptic replace the router, but the same problem comes back after a day or two of being up. Noise and RSSI are great at -89 and -29 respectively checked from another room right now and I'm seeing the issue even when stood in front of the router testing. (It's been two days, so time to reboot!)

It really feels as if this is an issue with the router, but there's no way I can find to check these things like memory or cpu usage. Hyperoptic support is just running in circles with days in between updates from them, basically blaming interference. The device is about two feet from the same cordless phone in 800Mhz range (I believe) as the old single band router was, but nothing else. Again, noise and RSSI measured from next room show great RSSI and noise values.

Anyone experience similar issues or have advice?

Edited by Luinnar (Sat 01-Jun-19 22:22:59)

Hyperoptic�s equipment isn�t particularly good. If you have the cash to spare and this is annoying you, get a third party router. My Netgear R7800 has had an uptime of 40 days without any performance hit.

+1 for the Netgear R7800. Its the #1 standalone router for wifi range/coverage as tested by Tim Higgins on smallnetbuilder.com

Hey Luinnar!

This really does sound strange. Would you be able to PM us your details so our Tech team can review your findings and offer a solution? We are happy to help!

Cheers,

In reply to a post by Hyperoptic_CS:

Hey Luinnar!

This really does sound strange. Would you be able to PM us your details so our Tech team can review your findings and offer a solution? We are happy to help!

Cheers,

Thanks. It took a strange turn. Prior to my post here, the cs rep had changed the 5Ghz channel selection from Auto (it was using channel 100, which was unused by anyone else in range) to manually setting to 36 (which was used by about eight or so other routers in range). When I asked the cs rep why he thought choosing a channel with lots of interference would help, he made this wild accusation:

The reason I set the channels to 6 and 36 is because Apple devices heavily prefer these lower channels and these issues, even though there is more noise, might be alleviated with these channels. This issue is well-known and can be found on Apple's forums.

I replied back challenging this and asking for evidence; I pointed him to Apple's kb that specifically recommends setting 5Ghz channel to 'auto' to avoid interference: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202068

After a few days of no reply, I posted here and on another forum. I didn't mention his accusation at the time, as I assumed he'd admit he was grasping at straws and drop it.

But I did eventually get a reply and he doubled down on this, linking to some user threads on Apple discussions - none of which were similar to my issue and none of which had an actual engineer or Apple rep posting. They were just unsubstantiated claims with no followup.

He eventually claimed:

I do not believe that any white papers have been issued on this matter, but I want to assure you that Apple devices have had some form of issue with the 5Ghz band and it is indeed sporadic and not easily define--I've seen this from dealing with hundreds of requests. This is the best explanation I have been able to approximate for this particular anomaly, as the speed remain steady.

After much more back and forth, including traceroutes when the problem was presenting, the rep finally offered to send me a different brand AC router. Up till then, I had been using the Tilgin HG2381. He had someone drop off a ZTE H298N to see if that made a difference.

And it did. It's now been seven days of uptime and my wifi continues to perform perfectly.

First, I didn't realise you had different brands of AC router for potential use. It would seem the ZTE is certainly more stable than the Tilgin. Indeed, the original single-band Hyperoptic router I had been using was ZTE and I had no issues with the wifi; I only replaced it to upgrade to ac.

Second, I find it really worrying that the cs rep is so confident that Apple devices were the problem. He's seen this dealing with 'hundreds' of customers. He's clearly convinced himself that this was the cause, which interferes in his ability to probably troubleshoot and identify the problem. Surely if Apple devices were known to have issues with 5 Ghz and higher channels, there would be actual evidence of this in the form of whitepapers or posts by technicians.

Finally, I've worked in IT support for 15 years and am very comfortable in calling out third-party suppliers when I think they're speaking rubbish. But I'm conscious most of your customers probably don't have the experience or confidence to do this themselves. I'm worried about how many of the supposed 'hundreds of customers' who had similar issues were given the same misinformation and runaround and simply gave up on trying to get this actually resolved, and resigned themselves to either regularly rebooting the router or buying their own replacement.

Indeed, before I had the offer for the replacement ZTE, I had actually ordered a replacement ASUS router to test. I fully expected that to work perfectly, which would be evidence that it wasn't the Apple devices, but the Tilgin router, that was the issue. Thankfully the ZTE proved that for me and I can now return the ASUS unopened.

I'm going to ping you the ticket number I would welcome you looking into this further, though my issue is now resolved by replacing the Tilgin router.

In reply to a post by Damarr:

Hyperoptic�s equipment isn�t particularly good. If you have the cash to spare and this is annoying you, get a third party router. My Netgear R7800 has had an uptime of 40 days without any performance hit.

What ISP provided router is any good? They are all insecure heaps of junk.

Hi Luinnar,

Apparently I have the *exact* same problem as you reported. I am one of the "hundreds of customers", with connecting speed max-ed at 10Mbps after a day or two, and back to normal 150Mbps after router reboot. For research purpose the IPv4 speed never dropped, it was the IPv6 connection that keeps failing. This is the ipv6-test.com page before and after reboot:

https://imgur.com/QELhjEv
https://imgur.com/x7Znr6Z

HO's own speedtest page, although provided by Ookla, can only test IPv4 connection so I thought many HO users were "deceived" in having a great connection when their streams buffering. However, credible services like Google (YouTube, Drive, etc) or Dropbox seems to use IPv6 mainly.

I am using the Tilgin router as you did. Although I didn't got told by the customer rep to switch the wifi channel nor the Apple devices liking specific channels. He instead changed the DNS server from HO's own to GoogleDNS (8.8.8.8), but then realised that Tilgin only supports changing DNS for IPv4 but not IPv6. I suspect it was something to do with HO's DNS server but obviously I could not check.

I got swapped for a newly made (Dec18 vs Jan19) Tilgin but the same issue occurs, so either I am unluckily holding two malfunctioned routers, or there's something wrong in the line or the router itself.

A couple of questions...

1. I got upgraded from the ZTE router to the Tilgin one, before having all these troubles. I recalled that ZTE didn't have dual-band wifi (2.4+5) or ac speed? Could you please confirm this is the case? If you don't mind could you also see if it supports native IPv6 or tunneling only?

2. Is your router running HO's own IPv6 DNS server? As said above I suspect this is one of the culprits but without the ability to change it I am unsure.

For your information I have never heard of any Apple devices selectively favouring specific 5Ghz channels. I have changed channels across the spectrum and all (old and new MBP, old and new iPads, old and new iPhones) managed to pick up the signal. I also have PCs and Androids running, all devices faced the same slow connection when the "slow period" was happening, so I agree that your CSR most likely was talking something he had no idea on. Amazon's FireStick non-4K version, however, does have a range of channels from 36-48 (i.e. non-DFS). It cannot scan beyond 52.

Much thanks.

I think we can safely determine that the problem is with the IPv6 stack in the router. As a reboot fixes things I would also say we can safely put this down to a memory leak. Can you get a shell on the router and take a look at the memory usage over time?

The firmware appears to be provide by a firm called Seliro and neither Tilgin or Seliro offer updates to download you are jiggered unless you are willing to strike out and run with a third party solution.

You might be able to bodge things take a PC and set the DNS servers to say Google's for both IPv4 and IPv6 and see if that gets your speed back. That would at least pin the blame down.

Finally you could get a WiFi smart plug and set a schedule so that the router is power cycled in the middle of the night every day till a firmware update is released.

As always ISP provided routers are best avoided.

Thanks for getting in touch!

When it comes to the routers we provide, our team is continuously looking into testing, upgrading or even changing the interface or the entirety of the equipment we are providing our customers with, depending on the needs or issues that may arise. The matters raised here certainly posed valuable insight that our team is now investigating and we will use the data and results to test the routers further. On a brighter note, we are happy to hear the ZTE router proved to be much more reliable and that you can return the ASUS one unopened. We would also like to thank you for persisting with us while we were getting updates for you.

If we can assist with anything else, don't hesitate to reach out.

Hello there.

May we please ask you to send us a direct message with your account details so that we can check this further and compare the findings we've had with Luinnar? We'd like to team up with you to help on this.

Thank you in advance!