Router making "whirring"/"hissing" noises and dropping intermittently

[#1]

Hi all,

I've been with Plusnet for just under a month. Since day 1, our router we received has fairly regularly made strange noises. To me, they're akin to when hard-drives would start to fail and you'd hear the disk whirring away inside your computer - but I assume there's no disks in my router ha But it's that kind of sound. It's surprisingly loud, when we're watching TV we can hear it and it's quite distracting. I haven't noticed any patterns yet to when it happens - we're decorating the living room where it is, so we don't spend much time in there other than a few evenings a week we'll watch a bit of TV.

Also, our wifi seems to drop intermittently through the day. The device we're on will show full wifi signal, but the internet just seems to drop for 10-30 seconds then come back. Could this be related?

We haven't changed any settings on the router since receiving it - it's just got the factory settings. 

Any ideas? I saw some similar-ish topics, but they all seemed to be from 2018 so I'm not sure how relevant they are?

Thanks

Joe

[#2]

@joe90mitch  Welcome to the forum.

There is one over arching problem, which is that the Hub One is a very poor device. Having said that your problems are not connected.

The noise is a 'feature' which Plusnet will tell you is 'within limits' without specifying what limits. Sometimes they can be persuaded to send you another hub, which might or might not be any better. Alternatively they will tell you to switch off the 5 GHz band as this tends to be the noisiest.

The dropped wifi could be due to an alleged firmware issue that some hubs suffer from. This has been ongoing for about a year. Another thing to try is to separate the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, see https://community.plus.net/t5/My-Router/2-4ghz-and-or-5ghz-best-practice/m-p/1351966#M840 as having the two synchronised bands confuses some devices.

What many of us has done is to give up on Plusnet hubs and spend about £20 on an auction site and buy a BT Smarthub 6, which is a far better device. Setting instructions are here  https://community.plus.net/t5/My-Router/Using-the-BT-Smarthub-6-on-a-Plusnet-Account/m-p/1587673#M85...

[#3]

Brill, thanks a lot for the information.

I'll try out those fixes at the weekend and report back