BT Home Hub / Wireless Channel Question

Hi,

I've recently been having trouble with my wireless connection in my house - I will try and give as full a background as I can:

We've recently had an extension completed and moved our lounge to the front of the house. As a big fan of Xbox, I first started noticing that my xbox seems to drop its connection on an annoyingly regular basis. However, I also noticed that I have trouble in the lounge connecting a few wireless devices. I tried taking the home hub 3 off of auto channel selection and chose channel 8 (used inSSIDer to see what free channels there were). It didn't seem to help much so I decided that I need a wireless range extender - which I am waiting to arrive from Amazon.

In the meantime though I have been working at home a lot and my router is sat next to me on my desk and I have noticed the wireless light flicking on and off at various points.

When our extension was done we also had the boiler replaced which comes with a wireless thermostat. I thought this might be interfering but even when the central heating system is off the connection drops out a lot.

Have spoken with BT twice now. The first call involved someone running a line test - not really what I thought needed doing as I told them the problem was with the wireless seemingly dropping, but probably a standard check. To my surprise she said there was a fault on the line and someone would ring me back. The next day someone did call back but as I'd been out at work I couldn't tell him whether there was any improvement so he just said call back if there was any more issues.

This morning I couldn't even get my laptop connected to the router wirelessly without restarting both and when it did eventually connect it dropped out every 30 seconds to a minute.

Phoned BT again to be told that he could see my channel was set to 8 which is not recommended. I explained about the 4 other wireless networks in range being on 11 but he said that didn't make a difference as the weren't connecting to my hub. I tried to argue the toss with him but he stood his ground and I conceded. Have changed the hub to channel 11 and tried to play some xbox on line but twice in a row it dropped out after 3 minutes even though the xbox shows 3 out of 4 bars of wireless??

The BT chap also said something that I've never heard before (and I don't class myself as a tech retard!!) - he said that the recommend channel 6 for 1 wireless device, channel 9 for 2 wireless devices and channel 11 for more than 2 devices.

This leads to a few questions:

1. If there are a load of other routers within range on the same channel, is this really not a problem??
2. Do different channels really support a different number of devices?
3. Any ideas why the wireless could be dropping out? - so far today I'm hook up via ethernet and it seems to be fine
4. Anyone else had trouble with the wireless on a Home Hub 3?

My feelings on the above are that the chap I spoke to was talking rubbish on 1 & 2 and I think I might just need a new Home Hub.

Any help greatly appreciated!

Wireless thermostats operate at 433MHz or 868MHz - normally. So there should not be an interference issue.

What was the support person taking?

If others are using a channel, you PC and Hub will still see those signals and they will cause you problems and you will cause problems to those networks too. Choosing a channel away from there, as you did, is the right idea. Some suggest 5 channel spacing is best, so 1, 6, 11 but the interference potential when spaced by 4 is quite small. I tend to use 1, 5, 9, 13 (or put my neighbours on 1 and I use the other three).

Channels supporting different numbers of devices ... rubbish!

Thanks MHC - just as I thought. I do work in a vaguely technical job which does involve a bit of IT but the technicalities of wireless are not familiar to me!

When you talk to these people and they come out with some of these things like it's something they know about, I always end up doubting myself!!

He is calling me back @ 3pm-4pm today so I might have an interesting conversation with him!!