@KeithFrench,
I visited my fried yesterday. Firstly I used WiFi Analyser to measure the dBm of the signal - the view that shows the needle and beeps at you either slow or fast - just to get an initial impression. In the same room it was clearly a good signal, but even walking into the hallway, never mind a room that had two walls in-between, I could see it tail-off and the beep frequency got much slower.
However, then things all changed... I looked down into the corner where the router was (on the floor) and there was a jumble of wires - some things connected, some not, and I decided to tidy-up and remove unused wires (like, there were two RJ11s down there that were not connected to anything, a filter, some mains cables, a lonely USB cable with nothing at either end etc., so I cleared it all out and I'd disconnected the TalkTalk router at the same time.
Then I sat back and thought about the old TP-LINK. TalkTalk Support had told my friend it would not work with fibre as it was too old, and I'd originally assumed this too. But I connected it to my laptop via Ethernet and powered it on, then I went into Advanced - Operation Mode and changed the setting there from DSL Modem Router to Wireless Router - I altered nothing else at all. I saved, unplugged and just connected it to the ONT via the WAN port (actually LAN4).
It connected up to TalkTalk within moments!
To be honest, I didn't expect that and it changed the whole day.
The Sonos speakers connected up to it again, as they knew nothing else, and they saw the library on USB... and the Philips Hue Bubs started working again after I went and re-linked the skill with Alexa... all of a sudden my friend was almost back to normal. In fact, all that had changed was there was now fibre to the outside world.
So, I said - "OK, that's pretty amazing, shall we unplug it all and put the TalkTalk back in and test it and tweak it?" - and I was rather categorically and emphatically told - "absolutely not, don't you dare touch anything". It was actually quite emotional for my friend as TalkTalk had put the ONT in, plugged in the router and left without any other device being connected - so Alexa, Sonos and Hue didn't work at all, and the TV, others phones and computer needed setting-up for the new network obviously - it was a bad experience. This might be a normal install, of course, but it left anything 'smart' effectively useless as getting them working again was not so simple.
I used WiFi Analyser to do the same thing with the TP-LINK... even at the furthest point of the property the dBm was strong and the beeping fast. I had not got a leg to stand on when trying to persuade my friend to "give the TalkTalk a go". To be fair, I didn't push the issue too hard as it's actually the correct decision, without us doing some tweaking the TP-LINK as-is objectively performs better and TalkTalk would never have given USB sharing back on its own - it just doesn't have that facility.
I wanted to write back as you were so helpful, thank you!, and to explain why I wasn't sending through data yesterday.
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Hippo
