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[cancunia]

Thought I'd jot some notes down on my home ADSL / WiFi / Mobile situation
I have a very long line ADSL & am often on the lookout for ways to squeeze a bit more speed out of it. Last weekend, I bought a BT2700HGV from eBay an impulse, it only cost £5. It came with 5.29.117.26 firmware which although not the latest was still a bit more locked down than 5.29.107.xx so I downgraded it to 5.29.107.19. The downgrade was painless an allowed a couple of things I was looking for, a WiFi power hack & the ability to block remote management. The 5.29.107.xx firmware is also apparently immune to BT OTA upgrades, although it's highly unlikely that the provisioning servers are still active or it would be on v6.x by now. Must say that I'm impressed with the ADSL speed which is higher than anything I've had on the line before, time will tell how stable it is but so fa it's looking good.
Not only do I have a long line ADSL, but mobile reception is also very poor indoors so I'm experimenting with VoWiFi. The first problem I came across is that as the WiFi bandwidth is shared between all the devices using WiFi, speech quality was variable to say the least. My workaround for that was to put VoWiFi on the 5G band with no other devices sharing. That worked quite well on my BT HH6, but the ADSL was not quite as fast as it could be, so the plan was to use the HH6 connected to the 2700 via Ethernet as a 5G WAP, unfortunately, the HH6 is not happy without an ADSL connection and often resets itself, plus there are lots of reported problems with DHCP forwarding.
I also have a BT HH5 which I converted to Open-WRT during the week, the plan is to use that as a WAP, although the WiFi is not as good as teh HH6, I'm hoping it'll work better overall as a WAP.
More later...

   

[cancunia]

A quick update.
The OpenWRT firmware has a tutorial page for setting up a WAP, that part went very well. Unfortunately, the WiFi on the HH5 is not as good as on the HH6. I'm waiting for a friend to drop off a Cisco WAP and will see how well that goes on the 270HGV. Meanwhile, it's back to the HH6 as the router & WiFi.

[Alex Atkin UK]

The HH5 has a really weak CPU too, you can't get close to 802.11ac speeds out of it.

[cancunia]

The HH5 has a really weak CPU too, you can't get close to 802.11ac speeds out of it.

That may explain why the VoWiFi call quality was so poor on the HH5. Back on the HH6, slightly slower ADSL but vastly improved VoWiFi on the 5GHz WiFi. I spent a lot of time getting OpenWRT to boot up on that box, it was a bit of fun making it work but turned out to not really be suitable for day to day use, plus a few bits like SNR Margin & WiFi power tweaks didn't seem to work. It's a good opportunity to see the OpenWRT functionality though.

One thing I was mistaken about on the 2700HGV, it is possible to disable the WiFi so when the Cisco WAP arrives in a couple of weeks I'll see how it goes as an ADSL modem. Will report back then.