WIFI connection dropping / speed highly variable after moving to PlusNet

[#1]

Hi there,

I just moved to PlusNet broadband (from TalkTalk) last week.

I'm having real problems with wifi connections either suddenly going really slowly or not working at all.

My wife's Experia XA1 is intermittently getting no internet connectivity at all (even though it's showing 4 bars of wifi signal).

On other devices (other phones, desktop, laptop), the connection will be nice and fast (14MB/s) and then suddenly slow to an absolute crawl (less than 1MB/s). This seems to happen particularly when a device moves into range, e.g. someone comes home with their phone in their pocket.

All the lights are green on the router. But the home page on the router admin screen is showing no connected devices (even though there are about 7!).

Very disappointed so far as while TalkTalk wasn't perfect, we never had problems like this 😞

Thanks in advance,

Murray

[#2]

fwiw, I don't have an explanation for why your Hub Zero 2704n router cannot see connected devices.

In the mean time, can I suggest you try manually setting the wireless channel number to 1, 6 or 11 and see if it makes any difference to your wireless issues?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=89&v=J57pgKdRcBY

Note: safari web browser is known to be incompatible with 2704n web admin interface.

[#3]

Thanks for your reply Bill888.

I have tried manually setting the wireless channel to 11 and that didn't seem to help.

Setting it to bg only (rather than bgn) seems to have fixed the connection from the Xperia XA1 (at the cost of very slow printing), but doesn't appear to have addressed the problem of sudden drops in connection speed 😕

[#4]

Sorry to jump onto your thread. But i'm getting exactly the same issue here along with very erratic ping results from to google and bbc etc (ranging from 18ms upto 3000ms) with the PlusNet F2704N router and have been for a few weeks even with only 1 wifi device connected and 1 wired. When i experience this problem i can change the wifi channels which improves things for around 30 seconds until it goes [-Censored-] again. Additionally, the router admin pages just seem to lock up and not load for ages.

This evening, i changed a wifi channel and applied the change and the laptop wouldn't connect. I then got onto the router by putting my mobile phone onto the wifi and the wifi had completely disabled itself! Something is not right with this router, definately one of the worst i've ever used.

What's the process for getting this replaced?

[#5]

So things are now somewhat better with my internet connection after making the following changes:

- Turning off bluetooth on my wife's Experia XA1 has made the connection on that work much more reliably (I know, sounds ridiculous, but found that tip somewhere on a Sony forum!!)

- PlusNet support have adjusted the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and maybe changed some error correction settings at their end

- The OpenReach engineer has been out (he replaced the micro-filter with one built into the socket) and says the line is fine (but suggested trying a different router)

However I was still finding that download speeds were dropping very low (less than 4Mbps, sometimes less than 1Mbps) and ping times were extremely high (up to 1000ms) whenever anything was uploading data (e.g. Google Photos from a phone connected to the router).

So today I tried swapping the PlusNet router for my old TalkTalk one... and that totally fixed the upload problem. I can now still use the internet on other devices while one device is uploading photos.

Shame on PlusNet for supplying a router with no QoS / WMM.

Now I just need to try to get the router settings right as I'm seeing DSL drop-outs 😞

[#6]

Draytek Router every time ❤️