BT Additional Disc for use with existing BT Premium Whole Home Wi-Fi (AX3700) only, App for complete control and 3 year warranty

I was a bit nervous about buying these discs are seeing a lot of negative reviews. However, BT released a firmware update on 20/4/20 that has dealt with most of the issues & they are also promising an exciting roadmap. BT Wholehome Premium is superb value offering Triband with the latest 802.11ax superfast wifi (currently used for backhaul between discs). There are also, a number of other improvements over the standard BT Wholehome discs, including two RJ45 ethernet connections and a detachable stand that can be used for table and wall mounting. I've now installed the discs, updated the firmware and connected all my devices (Smart TVs, lots of Teckin smartplugs, Ring cameras, Sonos speakers, several Amazon Echos, Firesticks, iPads, iPhones, Android phones, laptops, games consoles etc). The basic installation was very easy. I did have an issue with the firmware update, which left the discs "blinking in update mode" for several hours, although I could still use the Wifi while this was happening. I used the BT Community for advice and they told me to power off and back on. This solved the problem. I also had a slight issue with Netflix support on my Smart TVs - there was a connection error to Netflix Server 1, but this has now resolved itself & working perfectly. It's so nice having super fast wifi access across the whole house with just one Network ID. No "not spots", no weak signal areas and seemless connection to the best disc as I move from one room to another. And having the 802.11ax standard should future proof me for the newer products that support this standard. My only real issue was that I couldn't turn off the 5GHz access (or name the 2.4GHz & 5GHz networks separately). I have a large number of Teckin smart plugs around the house. I use these to switch on sidelights using Alexa. Unfortunately, the smart plugs only work on 2.4GHz. There is a phone app to set the smart plugs up, but your phone has to be on the same 2.4GHz network. My phone kept defaulting to 5GHz, so I couldn't configure the smartplugs. I solved the issue, by switching off the Wholehome network and configuring the 2.4GHz channel on my BT Smarthub Router with the same name and password as my Wholehome network. I could then configure all the smartplugs using the 2.4GHz access point. I then disabled the 2.4GHz accesspoint (I could have just renamed it) on my BT Smarthub and turned on the Wholehome Network. Voila - all the Smartplugs are now connected to my Wholehome Network. Alternatively, I could have just changed the Wholehome Network name and passwords the same as my existing setup, but I wanted to change them into something meaningful for me. With a large network and a largish house, it was never going to be easy upgrading my wifi. But the experience with the BT Wholehome Premium has been very good and the result is brilliant. Don't let the negative reviews put you off, the latest firmware has resolved most of the issues.

Long term review: I’ve been using these for four years. I’ve stuck with them only because of the amount of money that I spent on them initially. TL;DR: the other negative reviews on these are wholly and totally correct. They drop out, on average, every 3-5 days and need a full reset. Coverage and signal strength with four discs in a standard sized house is poor, at best. The app is as reliable as the hardware - rubbish. Do not buy these. Buy anything else. Full review: The principle behind these discs, as with all mesh networks, is to extend your WiFi coverage, which is usually pretty poor on the standard routers provided by BT or another network. These discs do that pretty poorly for the time they’re actually working correctly. Set up is fairly simple using the app interface, but I found that the ‘sweet spot’ for distance was really hard to achieve as the hardware seems to rely on pretty outdated technology. I have a standard four bed house and we needed four, yes four, discs to get ‘complete coverage’. They still sit on ‘amber’ for 60% of the time, showing that they’re too far apart though. I appreciate our walls are brick, which will have an impact, but still. Once set up, the discs give us about 60-70% of our WiFi bandwidth, which is pretty rubbish. The main issue, however, is this: for absolutely no reason, around every 3-5 days they just stop working. No rhyme or reason. Things appear to be ‘connected’ to them, the lights are blue and on, but our smart home tech (including doorbell) and most other things lose connection. Not everything but almost everything. You then have to go into the app and reset the network in entirety. This isn’t as easy as you would imagine. When the network is ‘down’ you regularly find that the app says it can’t find the network, so you have to find a disc that will allow you to connect by wondering around the house. And even then when you press to reset it take upwards of 5 or even 10 goes to get it to acknowledge the reset. Until it finally takes, you just get an error message saying that it ‘failed to reset’. About once every six months you also have to go beyond an app reset and perform a full factory reset, which doesn’t improve the performance issues or weekly drop outs and causes a massive headache with connected devices. Before you ask, the official ‘support’ is unfortunately either one way communication with error reporting, or an email address that doesn’t get back to you. One of the other reviews suggested that there was ‘an exciting pipeline of developments’ on the way from BT for this system. Classic BT - promise the world and deliver absolutely zero. The last firmware update was literally years ago and no performance improvements have ever been made. These are now, I’d suggest, unsupported, dated pieces of expensive, unreliable hardware. BT, as with everything you do, you should do it better and put your customers higher up your list of priorities than your profits. People of Amazon, buy literally anything else. These things are marginally decent looking garbage.

I was apprehensive about purchasing this product due to the mix of reviews, particularly regarding using this with a virgin media hub 3. I found this product relatively easy to set up, just plug in and connect the first disk to your router, install the app and it takes you through adding and setting up all the disks step by step. The app also helps you with disk placement, scanning the Wi-Fi strength from each disk location you choose, suggesting if you are too far/too close to another disk. I was previously offered a power line adapter from virgin to improve the signal strength in the attic (the virgin router’s Wi-Fi would not reach the attic at all). Power line kept cutting out at various points in the day which was a nightmare. BT’s whole home Wi-Fi mesh system fixed all of my problems. It is so much faster than powerline (I was getting around 280 mbps in the attic, which was amazing, the same speed as being next to my router three floors downstairs). Zero dropouts throughout the day, made working from home enjoyable again as I use video conferencing so dropouts are very frustrating. The mesh network is seamless as well, can even FaceTime and walk all over the house and my devices handoff from one node to the other with no disconnection. Far superior to Wi-Fi range extenders. Overal extremely impressed, I have even bought 2 additional disks to expand coverage even further. One small issue happened after two weeks of setting up the system (therefore one star deducted for this) I woke up to find all disks were red and not working. I called BT, they were very helpful and told me that as I was using a virgin hub 3, it needed the latest firmware update. This was easily done by turning on and off the router to trigger the update on the router. Everything has worked perfectly since this. Highly recommend, especially when working from home and/or gaming and a fast reliable Wi-Fi speed is needed across the whole house.

UPDATE (December 2020): So, I originally had worries that these wouldn't last, considering how often they crashed and how hot it could get. Thankfully, after several software updates, they've been going strong. Even through the summer of 2020 (33 celcius days), they've felt warm, but never overheated. Though sadly, the set-up has not been improved. I did have to reset the devices once (again) since the updates as everything did crash in the night... around October. During that set-up, it was once again a huge pain to set-up everything, again. There is no improvement in that regard. Due to the heating not really a concern, I'm increasing the score. I'd like to give this 5 stars, but as the set-up is still not fixed, and I did have to restart two months ago, I cannot go that high. So a middle ground of 4 stars seems apt. Now, onto my original review: _____ First, I'm writing on a touchscreen. So I apologize for any grammar or spelling mistakes made. Getting past that, let me review this Mesh network with my usual pros, cons and neutrals. Pro:: + Unpacking the device is a nice experience. You feel like you're getting a premium product with this. Each thing is packaged neatly, in its own container, and organised for an easy setup. + The devices look nice, not standing out too much, and seem to leave room for ventilation. Just a shame we couldn't get one in black, or walnut to go with cabinets. + WiFi signal is MUCH better than what I was getting with my virgin router. Once set up I was getting 200+Mbps, easily. Even at the far ends if the home, near the toilet where the Virgin router failed, this got a stable 40Mbps. + Open source software, that DOES NOT require signing go to a sketchy terms and conditions (T&C) and Privacy Policy. This is the only Mesh I've found with this, and it is absolutely fantastic. Neutrals: +/- Only two Ethernet ports. This is not great for those with lots of wired devices. Though if you do, you're likely using a Switch. +/- The setup was a bit mixed. For the first node, things were a real annoyance. The first node kept failing to connect to the app, I had to reset, and repeats the process. The thing took neatly and hour to complete the to various issues. Then the 2nd and 3rd nodes were easy, even if the instructions were wrong. When turned on the devices quickly went into WPS mode, where the instructions wanted me to press a button. It seems that by pressing the button the sync kept failing. Just go through the set up on your phone, but ignore pressing the WPS, it is just less hassle. +/- The setup and maintenance of these devices seem to require the app. I'm getting no web interface, which is a shame if you don't have an Android/IOS device. You shouldn't be forced to require this, and a web interface can be so much more useful. I shouldn't need to use my phone just to check/do something. Cons: - Now I find this very disappointing, but the main device, hooked to the router seems to loose connection and/or crash. Almost daily I find the device looking like its switched off, even though it is on. It's given of no light, and is warm to the touch. I need to turn the device off and on again for things to start working as normal. So its an easy fix but annoying. - Another issue, but much less common. The other nodes sometimes loose connection to the main one. I need to go into the app and restart the network to fix this. Both these cons seemed to appear after a day or so of use. I've had these now for a while, and I'm afraid these could lead to further problems down the road. If these are crashing now (possibly due to heat), in winter, what's it going to be like in the summer. When that time comes the returns period would have ended for me. So I don't know whether I want to chance it. Plus if the device is faulty now, what about further down the road. I love the privacy and open approach to Mesh, which will lead me to look at BT products in future, but right now, these devices aren't up to scratch. Thank you for reading my review. I hope you've found it helpful. Have a lovely day :)

Short story Love Them! Expensive yes but its triband mesh system so its going to be. Also they're BT so their products are never cheap. I took a gamble and bought from Amazon Warehouse so nearly £50 cheaper! Its outer packaging was damaged but that was in the description, inside it was packaged nicely back up! No issue with the actual product inside. Setting up was really good and easy and only took a few minutes, connecting everything always was going to take longer with the amount of phones and wifi enabled gadgets in the house. Alexa seems to love it which is good and so do the Fire Sticks. I like that you can use any disc as the first one and they each have two gigabit network ports although I don't have a need yet. The disc is about 7" or 180mm in diameter so about the size of a side plate. Setting up parental controls was similar to the BT Smart Hub we have so was easy but then everything went down! So had to reset the first disc and attach all the other discs again but no great issues as it doesn't take long. I think it was a conflict between the parental settings I was doing at the time! Or maybe they hadn't had a factory reset since the the person sent them back not sure? I didn't realise that as its BT it brings the IP addresses through from the router and therefore the parental settings! That is a bonus so didn't have to remember what I had done much to the annoyance of my kids! At the moment I'm running it on a very long cat 5 network cable to the centre of the house so I could then have one disc at the front and the other at the back of the house not sure if this makes any difference, but will be doing some speed tests to see. I like the Guest network idea for when the kids have friends round I can just leave the details for them to use. I still haven't turned off the Smart Hubs wifi yet as I have a few more things to transfer. I like that you can turn down or off the led as I have one in the bedroom. I would like BT to do an update so they act like their black Complete wifi so it could use the Smart Hub as the first disc. So far 1 day 18 hours up time and going strong. Will update as we go.

For years we have been struggling with poor wifi in our 200 year-old house. We have tried the Power Line system but that only works for devices on the same electrical circuit. Wifi boosters have limited range. They all suffer from having multiple IP addresses. We decided to invest in the BT Mesh system having read many reviews etc. As a starter we purchased the triple pack. Out of the box all looks as advertised and installation (it says in the instructions) is simple - not so! Down load the app onto your mobile phone and you get more instructions which are simple enough if you follow step by step. In about 15 minutes the system is up and .... wait, it has disconnected! Re-connection is easy, turn the system off and turn it back on....same disconnection problem. Long story cut short, having moved the units to different positions, restored them to "out of the box" state and started again, reloaded the BT app etc the system was getting close to being returned. I had noticed that the old router network kept reappearing despite following the app instructions to "forget the old network". A call to BT support, which lasted 40 minutes, failed to get a stable connection. Having re-boxed the system for return I had a light bulb moment. The BT person had suggested finding the IP addresses of everything in my house and trying to find which items might be a problem. There are dozens to choose from but I noticed that one of them was the EE router which should not have been there! I put the router IP address in my search engine and up came the management of the router. One feature seemed to be able to turn off wifi at source. Not certain what would happen I did so anyway. Immediately the Mesh system burst into life and has not missed a beat since that change. I now have wifi in all the areas of the house I need, hence the 5 stars but a low score for the ease of installation and support. BT should rewrite their app to include situations where technology has a mind of its own!

First impressions are of a high-quality product, the box and packaging has been well thought out to give the impression that you have purchased a high-end product. Overall, I’ve given this product 5 stars in spite of the negative aspects of setting them up. 5 stars based on the build quality of the product and the speed of the wi-fi connection once up and running. I was surprised though how large each device is and also the weight was more than I expected, however no big deal really. The ease of set-up of the first device was really easy and as per the instructions, and only took a few minutes including the automatic firmware update. Setting up devices 2 and 3 probably took me the best part of the morning, following the instructions to the letter was getting me nowhere quick. I went on to the BT community web site for help. It’s surprising how many people have difficulty in setting these discs up. After reading about other people’s problems and solutions I tried again and again following the instructions to the letter lo and behold the devices connected to the first device and have now been connected for a few hours at the time of writing this review. The app to control the discs seems to be fine and has loads of options on how to control the network. Finally, I’m not sure what the original set up problems were, but BT has to look at this product from a set up point of view as it lets the product down and I can understand other people’s frustrations with it. I don’t know if it is the app, the instructions or the devices themselves or a combination of them all but BT needs a cold eye review on the set-up procedure. Anyway, once set-up the internet wi-fi connections in my house have vastly improved and in spite of the price of the 3 disc pack, I think it is worth it. Update - Excellent signal strength throughout the house, the hubs are very reliable and I've not had to reboot them once. I think the initial set up problem was due to the App connecting to my original BT hub, once I figured this out and made sure the App was connecting to the new hubs everything burst into life. Overall an excellent product.

They've just about done the job of getting WiFi into my kitchen, the furthest distance possible from the router, but they aren't fun to work with. The WiFi keeps dropping out for no real reason. Every time I try to change any setting using the app it drops the connection and insists it can't find any whole home discs on the network. Sometimes just trying to view devices on the network causes a connection drop, and is slow when it works. Furthermore I used to get WiFi in the garden easily with just the router, but with these discs the signal there is actually worse - I have to wander around to find a signal. Just moving the phone a few feet within the house can cause the WiFi to disconnect, then reconnect with full signal. I almost gave these one star, but they kind of work. Just about. Update: after months of dropped connections, devices not being given an IP address and other problems, I think I'm sending these back. One star.