WiFi

[Mindscape100]

We ended up going for the unifi unit... absolutely brilliant 5g all round the house

[ronk]

Update on my situation :-

I was advised to change the channel on the router to 1, 6 or 11 rather than leave it in Automatic mode
I now get a reliable flat line of 16.0 (ish down load! Thats about all my line will support say BT

[ronk]

The good news for my situation is that the Openreach fellas are in the area and installing Fibre from the green box!
Im not overly concerned at this stage about lightning fast internet but the 25Mbps I pay for would suit me just fine - as long as its a stable connection.

It might just be co incidence but since they've been working on the lines I'm now getting a 15.7Mbps all over the house service with a very stable supply. That is remarkable for me!

[BeeEmm]

Ron, this is the second post from you tonight that has commented on a month old thread, so maybe your Broadband is slower than you think.

[ronk]

It’s me that’s slowing up !

However I thought I was going to be stuck with slow internet for a long time to come and was very pleased to see the guys upgrading the system

[skelters]

Bit late to this but here's a saga that could have been sorted if I had replaced the Router but small incremental upgrades followed....

Original setup
Virgin 200Mbps down, 20Mbps up.
Virgin Super Hub 3
Two TP-Link Powerline adapters
Netgear 5 Port Gigabit Switch
QNAP TS420 4 bay NAS, 4 x 6GB drives in RAID 10. Total capacity 8TB.
Virgin Tivo V6
8 - 10 Wireless devices

Two years ago I purchased a Marantz NA8005 Network Audio Player and converted the entire CD collection to FLAC then moved all the Concert recordings I have onto the NAS. Currently around 170,000 tracks with 30,000 from CD's and 140,000 from Concert recordings. The concerts are Recordings of Indeterminate Origin and there's nothing illegal.

I'll say from the start that there are well documented issues with this Network Player due to what looks like network card problems and a mobile App designed and written by a blind man who likes eating crayons and knows nothing about apps. When it's working it's a half decent player as the DAC is quite good if you believe the reviews. The NA8005 has one 100mbps network port.

Music would play from the NAS > ethernet > Netgear Switch> Ethernet > Powerline > Electrical Ring > Powerline > Ethernet > Super Hub > > Ethernet > Network Audio Player. This worked when there were fewer devices on the network but would experience the Marantz falling off the network occasionally and stuttering playback sometimes. The reason for the switch was to use the bonded network ports on the NAS.

Streaming Video from the NAS to Devices was hit and miss. Could play video or music but not both. Worse when downloading via Transmission on the NAS.

This came to a head when I started using DSF and 24Bit audio files which were pretty much unplayable due to the networking issues.

First upgrade
Changed over to Cat6 cables

This solved the speed issues initially but it still wasn't great as there were still issues streaming from the NAS while downloading.

Second Upgrade
New NAS was purchased as the old NAS was low on disk space. Transferred the entire contents of the QNAP NAS to a new Synology DS1019+. This NAS has 6 x 6TB drives in Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) providing around 21TB of space.

This provides enough capacity and also let me install Plex along with Docker to run Transmission and other tools with decent indexing speeds of the music.

Speed issues still happening occasionally but not as bad as it was.

Third Upgrade
With the working from home we were put on a couple of weeks before the first lockdown I replaced the TP-Link Powerline Adapters with one TP-Link RE650 AC2600 Universal Dual Band Range Extender, Broadband/Wi-Fi Extender, Wi-Fi Booster/Hotspot with 1 Gigabit Port.

Speed issues almost gone although the Marantz Network Player was still falling off the network and having issues connecting whether DHCP or static address was set.

Also found that Skype and Teams calls had issues with audio and even a couple of days with no connection to work on one the two work laptops.

Fourth Upgrade
Virgin not so Super Hub changed over to Modem Mode and a reasonably priced ASUS RT-AX82U 5400 Dual Band + Wi-Fi 6 Gaming Router.

After looking into the issues with the Super Hub 3 it turns out that the traffic management on the device is really poor. With the increased traffic on the network there was a bottle neck that became apparent with working from home since the start of March.

This solved everything. Full speed from the TP-Link extender, laptops, mobiles, tablets. Streaming from the NAS while downloading, playing audio files, video files, Netflix, Spotify and everything else we use is perfect.

Not upgrades but extra added to the network....
2 x Wi-Fi capable HD TV's in bedrooms to replace the TV's we had
1 x TP-Link RE450 AC1750 Universal Dual Band Range Extender for the 2nd Virgin Tivo Box upstairs.
Added two M.2 NVMe SSD to the Synology NAS for Read Only Cache. It's now incredibly quick and recently upgraded to DSM 7 Beta.

Current setup
Virgin Super Hub 3 in Modem Mode
ASUS RT-AX82U 5400 Dual Band + Wi-Fi 6 Gaming Router
TP-Link RE650 AC2600 Universal Dual Band Range Extender
TP-Link RE450 AC1750 Universal Dual Band Range Extender
Netgear 5 Port Gigabit Switch
Synology DS1019+
2 x Virgin Tivo V6
15 Wireless Devices

So, If you're on Virgin change it over to Modem Mode with a decent Dual or Tri Band Router sooner rather than later as you'll notice a huge difference. Look at possible future proofing with the Wi-Fi 6 router and a Mesh system. Anything else on the BT lines then look at the Wi-Fi Routers and Extenders first. Start with monitoring the speed you're getting compared to what you're paying for. A new Router might just fix all your issues.

I'd also recommend trying to force any device onto the 5GHz band as the 2.4GHz band might be overcrowded with devices.

Current Speeds right now
TP-Link RE650 AC2600 Universal Dual Band Range Extender and Synology 1019+ NAS 1733 Mbps Both connected to each other via the Netgear Gigabit Switch.
One Plus 5T Mobile Phone 866 Mbps wireless to the router on 5GHz
MSI Laptop 866 Mbps wireless to the router on 5GHz
Marantz NA8005 hard wired into the router 100Mbps.

Also upgraded the Van Damme Blue speaker cables to QED Reference XT40i Speaker Cable but that's another story!

Just another 1000 discs to be copied over onto the NAS then around 2000 DVD's will be converted!