Hello folks,
I posted over a year ago about the problems I was having setting up internet access in my local bar. I am still having problems!
We are now on something like our fourth router, two BT supplied Homehub 3's, the original BT2700HGV and one Homehub 3 supplied by yours truly for when the official ones give up the ghost. Which is unfortunately on a regular basis. Our latest BT supplied Homehub is going the same way as it's not so honourable ancestors...needing to be hard reset every couple of days due to it locking up completely. Indeed, locking up to the point that I can't get to the management page using ethernet. So it looks like we are going to be looking for another replacement from BT, our fourth replacement in a year and a half.
We are a busy bar, frequently seeing a couple of hundred people through the doors at the weekend, every one of them trying to check in on Facebook through their phones! As far as I can tell the router falls over due to the high changeover rate of devices trying to connect. As set from factory the DHCP lease time is three days, fine for a home or small office environment with a limited number of wireless devices but completely useless in a busy ever changing bar. In a few hours the pool of available addresses is taken and nobody else can connect to the router. Shortly after that the router locks up, I assume because it simply can't cope. All the routers supplied have done this from new, we know when a router is about to give up completely though as the rate at which it locks becomes a lot more frequent.
I have changed the lease time to three hours in an attempt to free up more IP addresses and turned off the BT wifi side but the router still locks needing a hard reset and all the settings to be reinstalled. Not easy on a busy Friday or Saturday night when all the bar manager has to do this is his phone! I assume it locks with the lease time reduced due to it having to continually poll it's available pool of IP addresses to see which ones are free. So leave the lease time at factory settings and it locks, reduce the lease time and it still locks.
In my opinion the Homehub 3 is as I said fine for home or small office use but completely out of it's depth when it comes to a busy commercial environment.
Is there anything we can do about this? Demand better equipment from BT? They knew the router was being supplied for a bar and must have known it wasn't suitable? So why did BT supply us with a home router (with commercial firmware) for a busy bar? Does anyone else on here have the same sort of problems or use a Homehub in a bar or club? Or indeed give us a solution other than demanding that BT replace yet another of it's shoddy routers?
Jerry
