This one is interesting it came about last year 2014 with people coming in with issues of wifi dropping on random devices. After a lot in investigation we managed to narrow the findings down to BT Home Hub 4 + 5 and their joint wifi optionto transmit both on 2.4 and 5GHZ. One last thing you can try prior to following our suggestion below is test your machine on another network. There are loads of coffee shops or fast food places which offer free wifi so grab yourself a coffee and take the machine down to the place to test it. Obviously this only works with mobile devices like iPads laptops etc walking in with a iMac is a bit harsh.
The simplest solution is to login to the BT Home Hub (login details are on the card on tieback of the hub) go to the wifi option and uptick duel network for 2.4 and 5GHZ. Reboot and you should be fine. Since that works on most cases to ensure you don’t get a drop of wifi signal on your mac I would recommend you change the network names of both the 2.4 and the 5GHZ. You must ensure they are named different so the example is as follows:
BT Home Hub 4 WIFI is BTTEST123
Change the WIFI to BTTEST123 (2.4GHZ option) and change the 5GHZ to BTTEST123-5GHZ.
by doing this it gives you the option to join whichever network you like ideally you need to join the 5GHZ as its faster. Click here for BT Help webpage.
The more complicated solution is to rip out the Home Hub and install a Apple airport extreme using that as your router. In the wifi settings you tick the 5GHZ option and it will come up as a separate network name to the 2.4GHZ it also transmits on ac along with n and b. This is the option I sought and guess what a lot of internet issues I used to have, have now all gone away.
Hope you find this handy in dealing with wifi issues at home.
New update for 2016. Have now encountered this one with sky and talk talk. The solution is the same untick the ‘Sync with 2.4 Ghz’ and you should be good to go.
Here is the list of things to do from the BT website help page:
- Open your web browser on a device connected to the Hub and go to bthomehub.home. This will open the Hub Manager
- Click on Advanced Settings and enter your Hub admin password when prompted. Unless you’ve changed it, you’ll find the default Hub password on the Hub settings card
- Click on Continue to Advanced Settings
- Click on Wireless
- Click on 5GHz
- Change ‘Sync with 2.4 Ghz’ to No
- Change the ‘Wireless SSID’ to a new name (we recommend just adding ‘5GHz’ to the end of the existing SSID name so you’ll know which one is which)
- Click Apply to save the changes