2.4 v 5Mhz

A mate of mine have a BT home hub 5 which I set up for him a couple of weeks back when he had BT broadband installed.
All seemed fine until he got in touch with me this morning that he have been having problems with his Iphone and EE Wi-fi calling.

So I went up there this afternoon to have a look, his Wi-fi calling kept cutting out , even if he moved into the next room, whihc is no good for him at all.
He said that his old AOL D-link router worked fine, with it, so my idea was to make the homehub 5 a modem only, and connect the D-link as a router. but found out there is no way to disable the DHCP on the Home hub.

We was about to go out and buy another router/modem and then I thought that maybe it is the 5Ghz band that is the problem, so I unlinked the SSIDs and changed the 5ghz by adding a couple of numbers to the end. and I got his phone to connect to the 2.4 side only and it worked, he was even able to go outside and across the road with no problem at all. As a test I got him to connect to the 5Mhz band and do the same test and it failed again.

I thought this 5Mhz band was better than 2.4mhz, but it seems like it is not.
I had the same sort of problem with my next door neighbours HH5 which is why they went back to the hh3.

Any ideas why there is a problem?

Sounds like interference on the 5GHz band.

You can turn off DHCP on the Homehub but there's no need to. Just go to the A-Z in the top RH corner of the Web GUI and find it in there under D.

The joys of wireless

5GHz often has less range than 2.4 GHz and has a sharper cliff edge, and many people have found running on two different SSID works better than letting devices roam at will

Another problem is the auto channel setting. You will find it's better if you select a channel manually rather than autoselect as this can move around if interference is detected. A manual channel will stay fixed.

All things being equal, i.e. if you were testing this after a zombie apocalypse and there were no other humans or WiFi points or sources of interference....

2.4GHz would have better range, and marginally better penetration.

5GHz would not have the same range, but has a slightly higher power limit on some bands, so might end up at about 60% of the range of 2.4GHz. However, it has many more channels and much more bandwidth, so if you're in range you will get a higher link speed.

Back in reality, you find that 2.4GHz is very overcrowded, by all sorts of things, so in many cases 5GHz has better range. In some - yours for example - 2.4GHz has much better range.

But 802.11ac is only on 5GHz so your maximum speed will be higher if close to the router on 5GHz.

I have used inSSIDer and more recently ACRYLIC to measure the Signal Strengths for both bands around my house, coming from the same Modem/Router.

Typically, the 5 MHz Band is -10 db worse/lower/weaker than the 2.4 MHz Band.

-10 db is a very significantly lower Signal Strength.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

Sounds like interference on the 5GHz band.

You can turn off DHCP on the Homehub but there's no need to. Just go to the A-Z in the top RH corner of the Web GUI and find it in there under D.

Oh right, I will have a look there if he still have problems.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The joys of wireless

5GHz often has less range than 2.4 GHz and has a sharper cliff edge, and many people have found running on two different SSID works better than letting devices roam at will

I thought 5Ghz ( why did I put Mhz? ) would do that as it would use shorter wave lengths and would get bounced around a bit.

I was thinking of getting a new superdouper modem/router, a TP link one for my Plusnet, but I think I am better off staying with my old Tp Link.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

Another problem is the auto channel setting. You will find it's better if you select a channel manually rather than autoselect as this can move around if interference is detected. A manual channel will stay fixed.

Done that, I always change them to manual. I have Wi-fi analyser on my mobile phone and it shows which channel is the best to use.

Also worth mentioning, this will really mess up Wi-Fi calling...

With the 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz on the same band, the phone will dynamically and automatically switch between the two bands in the background. Everytime it changes bands, WiFi calling will drop out. So you could be roaming around the property with WiFi calling dropping in and out despite constantly seeing WiFi signal.

Things like Facetime, skype and iplayer seem to have a buffer where they cope with a milisecond drop out as it switches bands. WiFi calling is very sensitive.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Thu 10-Dec-15 09:38:57)