Total Connect - Loss of Communication

[g6ejd]

Interestingly mine has been OK all day - located in SW England

[paulockenden]

No dropouts here, either. Do both of your monitored properties use the same ISP?

[Arrghh!]

No and the one affected yesterday is with BT...

[DBMandrake]

No problems here recently so I don't think its a problem at Honeywell's end.

[G4RHL]

Over recent weeks I have had some issues with communication being lost even though the internet is working fine for everything else. I took the batteries out of the Panel and then reinstalled so it could reset itself. It seemed a little better but I was not 100% convinced. It is odd that it looses contact with the wifi when it is only a metre away from the router and I assume there is some weakness in the Panel's connection abilities.

I then wondered about the settings in the router itself. Although other devices connect OK I thought there was a possibility the channel settings might not be acceptable or causing an issue. My router's wifi (BT Hub 6) was set to channel 6, which is one of the recommended three (1, 6 & 11). I reset the router to automatic channel selection. That seems to have reduced the instances of drop out from the Panel. It makes me think there is a design fault in the Panel which has it struggling to make connections. It is all I can think of and odd when all else is working OK. It could of course be next door's solar panels creating interference as I know they do that on one frequency although not that which the Panel works on!

So those of you with connection issues perhaps try resetting the Panel and check the settings on your router.

Another issue that has not gone away is if away from home the app often struggles to connect. The previous version did not as much. Whilst other apps that control things remotely at home connect OK, the Evohome app does struggle if the signal is not very strong.

[DBMandrake]

My controller is about 5 metres through a brick and plaster wall to a Virgin Media Superhub 2 - and I've had zero problems with Wi-Fi connectivity, it always reports full signal on the controller and the only issues I've had are if my broadband connection itself goes down or if the Honeywell servers are having issues.

I wouldn't be so quick to blame the controller, Wi-Fi is a funny old thing at the best of times (I manage the wireless network at work so have quite a bit of experience with bizarre Wi-Fi problems...) and apart from not supporting channels 12 and 13 I haven't noticed anything particularly bad about the Wi-Fi support in the Evohome - it even gets a connection on the far corner of the house where other devices are getting a marginal connection, so sensitivity seems ok.

If changing the channel helped then almost certainly there is some interference on or near the original channel, and not necessarily other Wi-Fi signals. Different devices react differently to interference, some are more forgiving than others depending on whether they're using G, N or AC, whether they're single or multiple stream, and what channel widths they're using.

For example if you have wide channels enabled on the router (which you shouldn't really on 2.4Ghz) then there might be interference on the "primary" channel of the wide channel pair - any device with wide channel support (most devices these days but probably not the evotouch) could still get a decent throughput using the other channel of the pair but a device that didn't support wide channels would struggle.

Likewise devices that support MIMO can resist interference a lot better than devices that don't support it as they can select the antenna that gives the best signal to noise ratio on the fly or in some cases perform beam forming. (Usually with AC only, beam forming was vendor specific in N and rarely supported)

The wireless in the Evotouch is bog standard 802.11n 2.4Ghz, single stream, and I believe (but haven't checked) only narrow (20Mhz) channel width, which is pretty dated now but perfectly serviceable for the small amount of data it needs to send and receive to the Honeywell servers. It won't be as robust in difficult RF conditions as AC with full MIMO support though - it's quite incredible what AC with MIMO support can do compared to no frills N!