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BT Home Hub 5 is faster than Smart Hub 6

odyssey
Dabbler
Posts: 24
Thanks: 7
Registered: ‎15-01-2017

BT Home Hub 5 is faster than Smart Hub 6

I've been using a BT HH5 for the the last few months and have had a solid, stable and reliable DL connection 14 -14.5Mb/s with a line status of about 16.5Mb/s (600m from the exchange) and average upload of about 0.8 Mb/s.

The only drawback is a wifi signal strength of about 40-50% at the front of the house (on 2.4Mhz). I got the chance of a new smart hub 6 very cheap so it seemed worth a try rather than messing about with boosters. HH6 works fine with about 30% improvement of signal strength, BUT the DL speed has dropped by 2Mb/s, and the UL speed increased to about 1.16 Mb/s.

Left it a few days with no increase, so I plugged the old HH5 back in and the speed is straight back up to 14.29, and the UL is back down to about 0.89.

Same settings on both hubs.

Any ideas?

TIA - Alastair

2 REPLIES 2
Anoush
Aspiring Hero
Posts: 2,568
Thanks: 572
Fixes: 139
Registered: ‎22-08-2015

Re: BT Home Hub 5 is faster than Smart Hub 6

It may be worth changing the wireless channels in the Smart Hub 6 to see if that helps increase the wifi speed.
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odyssey
Dabbler
Posts: 24
Thanks: 7
Registered: ‎15-01-2017

Re: BT Home Hub 5 is faster than Smart Hub 6

Thanks Anoush, when setting up the HH5 last year I went through all the best channels using the wifi overview app and eventually realised the 'smart' auto channel hopping setting produced he most consistent results, the most contention I ever saw was 4 users on channel 1, but usually most of the 2.4Mhz channels show 1 or 2. The HH6 is also on smart and usually uses ch11.

Apart from that, it wouldn't affect the max data rate, as the main PC is wired and the router is connected via a 7m dedicated cable (genuine BT solid copper core, which alone gave a 1.5Mb speed improvement) hard wired into the ADSL faceplate.

HH5 stats show:-

up/down max line rate of 1108/17072

Data rate: 1112 / 16737
Noise margin: 6.7 / 5.4
Line attenuation: 13.5 / 28.1

HH6 stats show:-

up/down max line rate of 1284/16952

Data rate: 1.27 kbps / 15.12 kbps
Noise margin: 6.4 / 6.1
Line attenuation: 27

I asked the same question elsewhere and it was suggested that different chipsets could be the reason, but why would a later development cause a backwards step?

The attached speed chart shows the results from last year, you can see when the HH5 was installed in June after the big drop when we had line problems. the ups & downs at the RH end are the various swaps of the hubs during the last week, currently on HH6.

TIA - Alastair