While BT continue to annoy me on the telephony front by sending SMS spam messages:
I use Smart Talk and I have the appropriate calling plan.
Sigh.
However, another problem that cropped up recently was getting the iPad to download Sky Go Extra content without the entire wireless connection dying and having to disable/re-enable wireless on the iPad to get things working again.
What happens is the download starts off, then eventually the Sky Go app becomes sluggish and goes into a kind of “offline” mode. Then other apps can’t connect to the internet.
The first thing I stumbled across was this post to the BT Community Forums that stated that Apple kit hate sharing the same SSIDs across dual channels. But I found this simply wasn’t enough.
To get around the problem I’ve had to separate my iDevices into 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz groups.
My iPhone, Kindle Paperwhite (2nd gen) and iPad now all use the 2.4Ghz range using a unique SSID. This is a good idea anyway, since 2.4Ghz gives greater range at the expense of performance. The 5Ghz band is used by the MacBook Air using another unique SSID. All other devices (Roku, PS3 and the Sk+HD box) use ethernet.
Since separating devices between both bands, downloads through Sky Go Extra on the iPad have been absolutely fine – no connection degradation at all.
It’s difficult to pinpoint who is at fault here, but given that I never had these issues with the Virgin Superhub 2 it’s a chance that something the HH5 is doing that is confusing the hell out of my Apple kit.
It should be noted that even dropping the connection from 802.11ac to 802.11n on the 5Ghz channel when all wireless devices are on it does not resolve the problem – one must physically separate the devices onto separate wireless bands.
