This is my reply (25 May 2024 + update 29 May at end) to the twitter operatives of 2 of the 3 companies involved in our 8-month saga of success and failure with our wifi installation. If either of these firms (or anyone else) can sort us out that will be wonderful but if not we’ll probably change to a different provider or seek a professional who can sort us out. (Is there such a kind of professional?)
Our house is a very ordinary London house with two main storeys and a second floor loft conversion. There is a garden and at the end of the garden a garden office. We moved here in October 2023 and on the first day had arranged for an internet installation by Community Fibre. This took place. It has a modem (or whatever the fibre equivalent is) located where the fibre enters the building in the ground floor front room. This joins to a main router made by Linksys. That broadcasts the WiFi signal and there are smaller Linksys boosters on the two upper floors of the building (trouble free), one in the kitchen at the rear and a fourth in the garden office. Each of these receives and re-broadcasts the signals.
It took a month for all this to settle down, with a few technician visits from CF. Finally everything worked very well indeed – we suspect that the key change was when someone at CF HQ allocated us more bandwidth or some similar action which prevented us having service drop-outs. In the garden office the wifi facilitated frequent zoom sessions, phone and a WiFi printer scanner (Canon G7050). This went on for some months. OK. Wonderful, even.
Then we began to experience drop-outs and complete wi-fi silence in the garden office. This seemed to be during bad weather. CF technician re-paired the boosters – the one in the garden office and the intermediate one in the kitchen.
In April I bought a pair of TPLink range extenders, installing one end at the intermediate booster in the kitchen and the other end in the garden office. This was intended to by-pass or supplement the wireless link from house to garden office. It did help. I had it wired direct to the computer and also as an input to the booster in the garden office.
A few weeks ago we found that the Canon printer in the garden office would no longer communicate by WiFI and a telephone support worker at Canon helped us to sort that out. For a bit that worked, though the cable connection between computer and printer/scanner also failed. Code fa4bf6b6b09f540e They were charming and for a day or two it worked when the wifi was on. The control arrangements for this printer are very obscure and the manual is next to useless. I haven’t yet allocated half a day to repeating all that until the WiFi is fixed.
The most recent CF technician to speak to me explained that the signal is a compound of 2.4 and 5 Ghz. 5 is better for speed and 2.4 better for range. They thought I should get these two frequencies split so that the extra range of 2.4 would improve the link to the garden office. They said CF could do that for us. It turned out that they could not. The next CF technician guided me through an attempt to split the frequencies using a LInksys App on my phone. But the App lacked the key command which she expected me to see so we gave up. She was going to call back after consulting others, but she didn’t.
The next technician I spoke to (at Linksys) guided me through splitting the frequencies but only then did they tell me that all the devices in the house would have to be re-set to the new frequencies and the boosters would need to be paired afresh with the main router. That’s a very hit and miss process but finally there was internet everywhere for a bit except for the garden office. This is a major disruption of our work.
CF repeatedly tells us that they do not undertake to make Wifi work in sheds or outbuildings. Our reply is that we know that, but the whole installation worked perfectly for months earlier this year, so they CAN do it.
I suspect their systems are so moody and badly documented that they don’t know why our WiFi worked so well, and thus can’t work out how to fix it.
Suggestions welcome, from the companies concerned or from anyone else. Comments below or on Twitter at @MichaelLondonsf postcode N22 6RE
Update 29 May. at the end of some twitter exchanges with CommunityFibre (Daniel) I was told that my story had been passed to the technical department. Later in the day today I phoned them but the man I spoke to Zach was calm, polite and hepful but had not read the story. He said he could not read it even if I told him the URL as he is not authorised to open web pages. (!). So we started from scratch. He got me to re-pair both the non-functioning boosters which took about half an hour. Then a new bit of info: he said leave the newly-paired boosters untouched in the same room as the main router for at least an hour. This gives them time to settle down to their new identities. Moving them into their final positions too soon can lead them to revert to their un-paired state. This last bit is not in any of the manuals I have seen. We’ll see if it works. WiFi so moody.
Meanwhile twitter produced nothing but mastodon was better:
Hambone Fakenamington@CenturyAvocado@fosstodon.org
@MichaelLondonSF To be fair your experience is normal. WiFi stuff is often annoying like this and “app based” administration doesn’t expose the information you need to correctly identify what the problems are.
and someone else (now gone) suggested a more professional brand of equipment.
michael edwards 