Don’t order any black disks until after you receive the Homehub 2.0. BT will supply up to 3 disks free to enable a fully reliable mesh. Request the 1st one and then a 2nd if you need it.
I have 3 (4 bedroom house, etc.) with one in the listening room, one in the conservatory and another upstairs. Together, they work really well.
Thanks for the help and pointers everyone - very much appreciated indeed 
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@Blythe Yes, I’ll have a quick look online in the next few days (no hurry on this) as I’ve nothing to loose. IIRC, when I did the search on how to reconfigure the router, I’m pretty sure I just did the basics, expecting to upgrade a lot quicker than we have - that was some two years ago!
@Proterra Interesting, I’ll take a look at TP Link discs as well. I’d originally intended to stick with BT to keep it all simple in terms of compatibility etc.
@Mr.M Yes, both of my BT Home Hub5 routers set up as Wi-Fi hot spots are hard wired to the network, each has a switch above them in the chain. I’ll be aiming to do that with the Wi-Fi extender discs too.
@Dave I’ve just changed package with BT, and they are sending out a BT Smart Hub2, but I’ve only signed on the dotted line for a speed upgrade, not for the “Complete Wi-F”. I was going to do it independently with secondhand discs.
Not sure if this helps, but I’ve got the Smart Hub 1, plus 3 of the white discs in a 5 bed house. Absolutely seamless roaming and rock solid since purchase 2 1/2 years ago. Even works down the garden, approx 40m from the house. Good luck
Paul
@PBenny That’s great. Thanks for the feedback, very reassuring that three discs work over a five bedroom house.
A bit of an update… BT sent out the Smart Hub 2 and it arrived and was installed yesterday. All working just fine. Via ebay, I won an auction for a triple pack of the BT “Premium Whole Home Wi-Fi” discs, so hopefully they’ll be here soon and I can report back then.
BT “Premium Whole Home Wi-Fi” are the general purpose white discs, the Smarthub-2 specific disc are black coloured.
The SH2 connects over wireless to the discs, each disc needs an initial temporary ethernet wired connected to handshake with the hub, after which it’s ready to be installed in its service position.
I believe the white discs require one to be ethernet wired to the hub
Thanks Mike. Yes, I wanted to try the white discs to see if we can overcome the massive dead spot in our annex first off (furthest spot from the router), then move to faster black discs in time and then sell on the white discs.
The weakest link is when you are reliant on Wi-Fi backhaul between the Access Points (BT discs in this case). This is simply a hidden backhaul only network on the 5GHz channels.
If you also daisy chain those AP’s the performance further degrades.
You could set it all up, check from your phone and all appears ok, but that mesh is going to be constantly evaluating its performance and adapting to the RF environment accordingly.
If you can achieve good RSSI levels (less than -69 dB as a minimum, lower is better, anything below -65 dB should be fine) between AP’s that backhaul over Wi-Fi you may well be ok for most usecases, the main impact if the mesh has a weaker backhaul signal strength will be reduced throughput and an increase in latency.
Ideally, and wherever possible, it will always be preferable to have a wired
backhaul between the AP and the Router, it’ll still function as a mesh and appear as a single WLAN SSID but the radio capability will not be constrained by the backhaul.
At a minimum ensure the AP’s are based on 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) to ensure you are taking advantage of the performance features this offers over previous generations of Wi-Fi.
Yes, aiming to have all of the discs wired to the network (bar one for upstairs, no cable run to this location), so theoretically the performance latency should not be compromised. Fingers crossed anyways! I aim this to be a work in progress though and will experiment with and without wired connection etc.
At the moment only the BT SH2 black extender discs are 802.11ax, BT advertise it as Wi-Fi 6
The white BT discs are now also available with WiFi 6. Certainly worth buying for future proofing, although its worth remembering that if you connect WiFi 5 or 4 client devices (802.11ac or n) the disc will not be communicating with them using WiFi 6, it will revert to the lower protocol.
Thanks Chris, I was not aware the white discs are WiFi 6, that must’ve only just happened as I helped someone set up her new house with new white discs in December & they were not Wifi 6.
My new laptop is Wi-Fi 6 & is working off a SmartHub 2 & black discs on Wifi 5, but as the down & up link ‘speeds’ are at BT’s maximum advertised number, not much point in changing.
If you take their complete Wifi packages it adds £10/month. Get them to provide the extra Black Disks to get the complete coverage they offer (3 max). At the end of the fixed term opt to go off that package to the Fibre 2 or whatever. They ask for the Disks to be returned, but if you don’t they bill you £30 each. It could be a good deal. You can buy Disks on Amazon for about £85.
Phil
Hi Mike, I think WiFi6 will come into its own for households with multiple users, large numbers of IoT devices, neighours using the same bands, etc.
For a bit of surfing, music streaming and TV I reckon most would be fine on WiFi4 if correctly configured.
The client capability is not an issue, the benefits of how Wi-Fi 6 works vs previous generations bring benefits to the network performance as a whole, it’s also backwards compatible to support clients with older generation radios and they can co-exist quite happily.
Read the small print if you buy the discs from Amazon and other 3rd party resellers. Mostly they are flogging off the old WiFi5 stock.
I believe the wifi 6 versions of the white discs are called ‘premium whole home’.
Agree. I bought brand new.
Is there a way to work out whether they are WiFi 5 or 6?
Phil
Of course WiFi6 is backwards compatible, as all WiFi standards are. Still, if you’ve done a proper job of setting up your LAN using a wired backhaul it will be using Ethernet for that, not WiFi. That final connection to multiple client devices is where the real gains come.
Ideally if you are looking to buy in to a complete BT ecosystem, you’re best doing so on the latest generation of products, including their gateway and extenders. Today BT build their own platform software based on IOPSYS OpenWRT (IOWRT) and manage this in house with a level of community support. The hardware is built to the BT spec, they handle everything else basically and optimise it to their network and enable it to be proactively managed in realtime and centrally within their network.
