I never realised bluetooth borked WiFi

[d000hg]

I was all set to shout at BT since our WiFi has seemed quite shoddy since moving to Infinity (from Sky ADSL) a few weeks back... hub reports 38Mb down but my iPad was reporting as low as .5Mpbs. I was ready to give their hub a good kicking until I remembered that I'd recently been using a bluetooth speaker on my iPad. Turn it off, and boom back up to full speed.

Reading around this is a known, apparently unfixable problem since bluetooth uses the 2.4Ghz range which conflicts with WiFi. But my new hub (and apparently my iPad) support 5GHz so I'm a bit confused why I still get the issue.

And apparently just turning the BT on on the iPad borks everything, even if it's not connected to anything - that doesn't sound right.

Can anyone shed some more light on what's going on, and workarounds? I was using my iPad with a BT speaker to watch Netflix fine the other day in a different room, for instance. Is it an iPad issue, a WiFi strength issue, or what?

[TheFaQQer]

I had that on one phone. Did a factory reset and it worked fine after that.

[WTFH]

Let me google that for you

[d000hg]

What part of "reading around" did you not understand? This isn't General.

[NickFitz]

Your router might support 5GHz, but is that the network you're actually using? I've got an Apple Airport Extreme, and the 5GHz is a separate network to the 2.4GHz one, with its own SSID. In my case they have the same name but with "5GHz" at the end of the desirable one. As, in my limited experience of them, BT like to give their routers SSIDs which are incomprehensible strings prefixed by something like "BTHub", you may find that your 5GHz network is actually one you've been assuming belongs to the neighbours.

[d000hg]

It seems I can set the router to use 5 or 2.4 (and I think it will fall back to 2.4 for devices which require it) transparently. The admin page shows me devices connected by ethernet, 2.4 and 5, and I'm sure it was showing my iPad3 connected to 5.

Which is another reason I wonder if this is an iPad/iOS issue over and above regular BT/WiFi interference - as well as that it happens even when no BT device is actually connected. The wife said she thought she'd read the same chip was used for both though either of us knows... her iPhone (4 I think) had a fault where both stopped working at the same time IIRC.

edit: although at the time of typing, my hub lists my iPad-2 using 5Ghz and my iPad-3 using 2.4GHz. Does one have shorter range perhaps, e.g. the iPad3 is further away so has fallen back to 2.4GHz?

[gables]

It seems I can set the router to use 5 or 2.4 (and I think it will fall back to 2.4 for devices which require it) transparently. The admin page shows me devices connected by ethernet, 2.4 and 5, and I'm sure it was showing my iPad3 connected to 5.

Which is another reason I wonder if this is an iPad/iOS issue over and above regular BT/WiFi interference - as well as that it happens even when no BT device is actually connected. The wife said she thought she'd read the same chip was used for both though either of us knows... her iPhone (4 I think) had a fault where both stopped working at the same time IIRC.

edit: although at the time of typing, my hub lists my iPad-2 using 5Ghz and my iPad-3 using 2.4GHz. Does one have shorter range perhaps, e.g. the iPad3 is further away so has fallen back to 2.4GHz?

The 5GHz has a shorter range than the 2.4GHz, when I say shorter I really mean less good at going through walls. I find my phone when connected to 5GHz is fine in the living room which is close to the router, it isn't so good in the bedroom, if I then connect to the 2.4GHz all is well.

[d000hg]

Sounds that could be the case here then. I might take the iPad from room to room and see if I can catch it swapping which frequency it's using.

[NickFitz]

Sounds that could be the case here then. I might take the iPad from room to room and see if I can catch it swapping which frequency it's using.

My various devices are supposed to use 5 but will sometimes switch to 2.4 for no reason that I've ever been able to establish, so that sounds like a possibility.

[d000hg]

As a slight update, I discovered that the BTHomeHub:

1)Lets me use a different SSID for 5GHz, if I want
2)Allows me to separately disable/enable 2.4 & 5GHz

I've no idea if all my WiFi devices support 5GHz but it seems I've got some options.