Constant wifi drops ....query smart meter

[iano11]

Hi,

I wanted to know if anyone else had had a similar experience to us.

We used to have a reliable DSL connection in a medium sized terraced house, the wifi covered the whole house, numerous devices all relatively stable.

The all of a sudden our wifi would drop connections randomly very frequently, teams calls for work became totally unusable.  Vodafone checked the router, did a hard reset, etc, couldn't find anything wrong.  It was the wifi not the internet connection.

At one point the misses resorted to working 1 meter from the routrer and it was still dropping, we resorted to trailing ethernet cables around the place for work.

Eventually I bit the bullet and bought a deco x73 and an additional x60, I set them up as a replacement for the VF router and it was flawless.  Even for a while i ditched using the x60 and just used the x73 router, still flawless.  We realised at some point that our issues started (we think) when we had a smart meter installed in the cupboard next to the VF router.

Skip forward a year we decided to renew for full fibre.  We were nervous because our mobile signal is woeful for VF so wanted to keep the landline.   We switched over back to the new VF router, and ditched the x73/x60 immediately the wifi drops repeatedly and is unusable.

So now we're back using the x73 (but this time as an access point as we can't do without the landline (more electricity spend!).  To my mind there must be something about the VF router not being able to cope next to the smart meter, but noone seems to have every heard of this issue before.

Has anyone ever seen this?

I'd love to remove the VF router and either plug the LL into to the x73 or have a reliable mobile signal but neither seems likely.

[Ripshod]

If you're at all technically minded there is a way to use an ATA with your own router to keep the land-line in operation, but that's a whole other topic.

I've been looking at the band the smart meters use, and to be honest only a poorly designed or screened router would have direct interference. There's in all likelyhood some detuning occurring to the Vodafone router, that's making it "deaf" to the 2.4GHz band when the smart meter is transmitting. That makes sense for that band anyway.

All conjecture though.

[iano11]

Oh thanks after a quick google I did not know such devices exisited,  I had hoped originally when buying I'd be able to us the phone functionality on the x73 (which I guess is a kind of inbuilt ATA) but it seems it's not possible from a number of other threads with the VF service.

Thanks for the insight on to the meter bands (this is the second VF router this has happened (pre and post fibre) so i suspect it's something design/build/specification related.  Surely there must be lots of people with a smart meter in a hall cupboard and a router in the hall, so you'd kind of expect this to be more common though. 

I'll read up a bit on ATA, VOIP services and if such things as mobile signal boosters still exist I guess.

[BobbySpray]

I've no Smart meter in the house but dropping of wifi is a daily occurrence here. Repeated calls to Vodafone have gotten me nowhere.