BT Home Hub 5 Router settings

[oldboy47]

I have been asked by my nephew if the BT general router has a default limit to the number of concurrent connections. Couldn't find anything on the BT website or through a quick search of posts so I turn to the Hexus knowledge base.
Thanks

[EndlessWaves]

Connections to what? Devices? The internet? Something else?

[peterb]

I suspect wireless devices - I've come across problems connecting too many devices to a BT home hub. Don't know what the limit is though.

[Dashers]

Default limit is the wrong terminology. It's more, what is the capacity of the box before it struggles and things start going wrong. I think getting a definitive answer to that would be tricky.

Any router bundled for free (or on the cheap) by an ISP is going to be built as cheaply as possible and not going to be the best performer. That said, they should be perfectly capable of supplying wifi to your average home/small business before falling over.

[oldboy47]

Thanks Dashers et al, I think you have answered the problem. There are up to 12 wireless devices and 5 direct devices all accessing the internet via the hub at any one time and it sometimes struggles to keep them all linked.

[Lucio]

Generally the overall bandwidth becomes saturated at that point anyway, rather than the device being the bottleneck.

If you think about it, even sharing 100Mbps fibre 17 ways is giving you an effective speed of 5.88 Mbps, and the upload speed is likely pushing around 1Mbps at best.

Frankly, anyone will struggle in that case, so tell everyone with a wireless device to shove off, or put a second line in

[watercooled]

What is it you're trying to resolve exactly?

One of the most common complaints I hear is real-time applications such as games, VoIP or streaming playing up as soon as someone starts causing any sort of large download/upload. Frustratingly, this is something few off-the-shelf routers handle well and leads a lot of people to blame the ISP, when in fact there's absolutely nothing wrong with the connection, and often not even due to the hardware itself, rather they don't properly (if at all) implement QoS to prioritise certain types of traffic.

Either way, with a bit more of an explanation of what's going wrong, we might be able to help better.

[Splash]

I've a number of customers who run their business for in the region of 100-150 staff on significantly less than 100Mb fibre: as Watercooled says, so long as you have some method to prevent one person trying to consume all of the bandwidth then it should be fine.

That said: the last couple of Home Hubs I saw were total junk, and certainly didn't have any of the capabilities needed to do this!

[oldboy47]

Just to update this - working with others we found that the BT Hub (it was a btbusinesshub5 btw) was struggling to maintain DHCP leases and that apparently was the reason for the problems connecting all the devices.

Swapped the hub for a nighthawk and separate modem and no problems now for more than 14 days.

One other issue resolved. Had intended to use the BT hub as a modem only but it then wouldn't let anything else work so we bought another modem instead.

My thanks to all for their help.