Streaming connection routes

I had similar issues to yourself with a BTHomeHub2.

As I read I correctly, whilst you have disabled wireless on the HH, you still use the Ethernet ports and are hence using it as a switch.

I have a very similar setup to you, but my Airport Extreme connects to the HH (HH wireless disabled) and then ALL peripherals (NDX, NAS etc) are wired to the Airport Extreme, using the latter as the switch.  Hence you are using the HH for Internet connection and DHCP duties only.  This has proved a totally reliable and stable solution.

Ah! interesting, will have a try on that.

I have just dismantled the powerline adapters and moved the Qnap and directly connected it to the Extreme. I have then enabled wireless on the qute and I have to say to my ears there is a difference...for the better, more powerful and spacious....or maybe its all a dream....

Hi PG, SKdrivers suggestion looks good, an other alternative is to to use a little cheap switch such as a Linksys or netgear and use that for switching duties, leave your home hub to act as internet router, firewall and DHCP  server. I can't say for sure but it smells like some sort of multicasting issue, and using the aforementioned switch should rebroadcast any multicast without difficulty.

Simon

This Unitiqute is doing my head in......argh!!!

After altering the setup on 16th as outlined above, I was impressed with the wireless connection and reliability on the network seemed better.

Yesterday the qute played flawlessly all day and then at night kept losing the network.

Today it cannot play internet radio or streaming from the NAS for more than a few minutes without dropping the network.

I use an airport extreme and an airport express to extend the network.

The qute is jumping from one device to another when it loses the connection.

I am going to try an ethernet connection from the extreme, which means drilling walls, but I have to say when the qute works it great, but I'm having doubts about how robust it is.... 

I have tried looking at reserving IP addresses on the extreme but can't seem to fathom it out, any ideas anyone.

Hi PG

I have a quite different setup to yours (just check out my posts) but I do have a 'Qute (and Serve) connected to my network via an Apple Airport extreme. 

Originally I too used the kit wirelessly and whilst not having quite the same numbers of problems that you report, there were times when wireless just 'fell over' and I had to resort to re setting.

At Christmas I took the plunge, drilled walls and Cat 5'd the Naim gear to the Exteme. Not missed a beat since!

Go on, get the drill out - you know you want to!

(just watch out for mains cables or water pipes!

S

Home hubs are like little dog turds that have been polished.

You have a £1000+ home streaming device, treat it to a decent router at say 10% of the streamer cost.

A homehub is given to you free, this should give an indication to its quality.

Thanks SRMT I am waiting delivery of a cable, so the drill will be doing some overtime this weekend!!

Hi Garyi I agree about the hubs, I just use mine for the internet, the wireless and router bit is done by an Airport Extreme.

BWs

PG

I forgot to say, best stear clear of Powerline adapters, they create RF pollution throughout your house / mains lead into hifi etc. but even more importantly they are single collision domain devices, like Ethernet from the 80s. Really not good for more modern network uses such multicast control point or streaming, whilst sharing the link with another application.

Kind of like driving a clapped out Robin Reliant up the motorway, it will do it, but not very quickly especially with passengers and mind you don't take those corners too quickly, oh and the exhaust is somewhat smokey, so anything driving behind gets a foggy view of the road ahead, but it does save on having to buy four tyres.

Simon

I so often had problems with my BTHomeHub2 that I finally got fed up with it and got a Netgear N600.  Much more reliable and trouble-free.

Hey Simon,

Hope all is well with you. A quick question I wanted to ask you - if you cannot for pragmatic reasons get the internet wired, is there a solution like a wireless bridge that can work. I don't mean wifi standard, I mean a two box solution with wireless in between.

Cheers, David

The airport extreme is not all that in my experience either.

Hi David, although wireless is all typically a single collision domain, I read, although have no direct expierience of wireless adapters that send and receive on different frequencies. If one used such a setup in a Adhoc setup, ie point to point, and the wifi frequencies ate fairly free (not having to be shared with too many wifi networks, then performance could approach a wired network. It's the concurrent sending and receiving on a point to point link that is key.

I believe the devices are called 'simultaneous dual band' or 'concurrent dual band'. Here is a link from Netgear http://www.netgear.com/images/..._15Feb1118-30527.pdf

Simon

I use 2 wireless devices  from Netgear working on the 5 GHz band. One is setup as accesspoint and the other as bridge. I bought a new unused pair of WNHDE111 for GBP30 from EBay a few years ago.

They support multicast point-to-multi-point HD video streaming on 802.11n WiFi.

These are the only devices I have working on the 5 GHz band, others are working on the more commonly used 2.4 GHz band.

The 2.4 GHz band is used by virtually all devices and people and is much more prone to interference from neighbours etc and also  more susceptible to interference from microwaves etc than 5 GHz band.

So if you need to go wireless I would look at such a setup with a dedicated 5GHz connection.

An other option to consider is using POF wired connections. POF is plastic optical fiber and is a much, much thinner cabling system than CAT-5/6 cables and can be more easily laid on surfaces or along plints than CAT-cables. Also you can put it inside electric conduits without interference from the electrical cabling. At the moment it is limited to 100Mb/s connections, but rumours go that within a year also 1 Gb/s versions will become available.You can read something more about it here: http://www.homefibre.com/

-

aleg

One tip for Sonos users who use a Naim streamer and don't have wired Ethernet into the listening room.

I use the Sonos network to wirelessly provide data to my NDX using the Sonos Mesh network rather than normal WiFi.  I have my NDX connected to one of the ethernet ports on the Sonos zoneplayer that is still used for Internet Radio and Spotify in the lounge. 

The Sonos wireless network is then separate to my normal wireless network and it seems more robust, presumably as it was specifically designed for the job of wirelessly transmitting music.  I can stream 24/96 to the NDX with the buffer 100% full all the time whilst using other zone players in the house on 16/44.

It also has the advantage that the wireless on the NDX can be switched off which benefits the NDX.

Richard

To the OP - in my (admittedly limited) experience in this field, I think that there are 2 issues that you've got. Firstly having your qute separated from the device it's getting it's files from by either a wireless leg or home-plug leg in your network - both perfectly valid options and fine when they work, but both susceptible to their bandwidth dropping below the necessary levels due to either interference or other network traffic. In the case of interference this can be a right bugger to isolate and resolve.

Secondly having your NAS on a different switch to your qute. This technically ought not to be too problematic, but if there is any doubt over how good the home hub is, then best to avoid any potential issues.

Basically if you can wire both the quite and the NAS to your airport extreme then connect the airport extreme to the home hub for Internet access.  Any wired devices that need only an Internet connection and not to be able to read from/ be served by the NAS can be connected directly to the home hub, if you run out of lan sockets on your airport extreme.

Many thanks for all the advice.

I have received my CAT6 cable and have the Qute and NAS connected to the Extreme which is in turn connected to the Home hub for internet. The TV/Set Top Box/Blu Ray are connected to the Home hub.....it is all working so fingers crossed for reliability.

One thing I did notice was the drop out from the Qute was worse when left on 24/7. Once turned off for 10 mins or so, it worked better, hopefully though the wired option will cure all.....

Once again thanks for the support from everyone.

Interested in how you get on. I have a BThomehub 2, a Qute and a Uniti. Same problem re intermittent dropouts and occasional dropped connection, on both streamers. Got fed up and started using USB sticks (last one a Lexar 128GB- very good by the way) but didn't keep wanting to swap over the smaller sticks to get access to all albums. So time for a bit of experimentation. Recalled reading slightly different posts from Garyi and Simon-in-Suffolk about the IP and DHCP. So I accessed the homehub through the computer and went into advanced settings and gave both streamers a set IP instead of leavnig it to the router to assign them. Two weeks on and no dropouts and no lost connections. Why that should be I don't really understand but it works.

Well, on the whole better hard wired in, but it has lost the network 3 times today, up until the last drop out it had been going about 3 hours.

We have a bit of a storm going on here in sunny Sleaford and had a power cut and I've just rebooted everything and it cut out after 3 songs.

I expect if I take it to the dealer it'll be like a car, works OK for them......

Hi

The Extreme is in bridge mode.

Must admit this is beginning to really hack me off.

I shall ask the dealer if they can check the Unit over, but they are 40 miles away.

What is really annoying is all other items in the home, whether wifi or hard wired work OK.

PG, have you tried plugging your Unitiqute directly into the home hub to see if it picks up the DHCP address? The reason I say is that DHCP is sensitive to timing of broadcast frames.. You have several 'serialising' links between your Uniqute and homehub (the Homeplugs and wifi).  These will affect the timing of DHCP frame transfer and perhaps together put it out side tolerance for your Uniqute, but perhaps just in tolerance for your other devices on the same chain. Therefore this might be a case where you can't use DHCP and manually assign the IP address as stated.

However if this is the case (ie your Unit does indeed get an address when directly connected to the home hub DHCP) then it points potentially  to broadcast frame latency issues which could affect AirPlay or upnp control / navigation performance later. 

A network is like an interconnect lead. A good network is like a good interconnect, it allows your equipment to work at its best. We don't normally use hook up wire for our interconnects, it will work but not sound good and might hum.. In the same way we need to think of our network, it needs to be simple with as few compromise devices as possible on the network path.

Finally, it is worth pointing out, if you successfully get a DHCP connection, and then it later drops out, my first suspicion would be DHCP.. When you request an address from DHCP it's usually a lease, ie you must re request your IP address on or before the given lease expiry period ( this will be given in the DHCP response) if something goes awry here, ie timing issue or protocol issue, then the lease could expire and the homehub remove the ipaddress from the network address table ( ARP table). Alas DHCP has many possible implementations, and so interoperability is always a risk. Again one alternative is to statically assign the IP address if this happens, or try a different DHCP server.

Hi Simon

Many thank for your help on this.

The current set up is now:-

Homehub wireless off with TV/Set top box/blue ray into into 3 ports, the gig port goes to the airport extreme.

Airport extreme, handles the wireless and the NAS and Qute are connected to it.

There are no power line adapters now.

This cuts out less than the other configs, but still stops.... 

I have changed on the hub the IP addresses to further up the scale for the NAS and Qute, both have found these with no issues, and since making that little change the system has not been played for any length of time, will do later today. The addresses have always been reserved.

So apart from linking directly in to the home hub I think I have the most straight forward set up now.

The link between the hub and the extreme is CAT 6 all other ethernet cables are CAT 5.

BWs

PG

PG, I feel you fustration...   Do you have a reasonable signal across your wireless access? My observation is that you have a lot streaming / transfer devices on your wireless, that caN be asking for  trouble, especially if signal is not optimum. 

Lets assume your signal is not optimum. How about your have your NAS fairly near the unitiqute and get a little switch to connect the NAS and qute together. All that sensitive upnp, and streaming data is then handled by wired Ethernet. Get an AirportExpress,  plug that into this new little switch, and set it as Adhoc or Bridge mode with your Extreme, (this config is shown in the Express manual )  that way you shoulnt get drop outs, and if DHCP is troublesome as I said above you statically assign the addresses. Just write it all down, and don't lose it.

Thanks Simon, will give it a try.

BWs

PG