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Telus installation questions for PureFibre 150/150

Monty35
Just Moved In

Wife and I are debating moving back to Telus now that they're doing the 150/150 package in our area, previously it maxed out at internet 50. We had switched to the shaw 150 which cost less and was obviously much quicker. Now that we're moving back I'd like to ask some questions about things for those who know better.

 

We live in a duplex style townhome, we're a bit of a square layout spread over 3 floors. The shaw and telus bonded connections both enter in an awkward location in a hallway on the third floor, strangely opposite of the main electrical room for our units. A previous owner has run cat5e from the modem location to two of the three bedrooms on the top floor and another line (thankfully) goes to the basement. I have coax lines to various places in the house and standard cat 3 phone lines but they all merge in the telecom room outside our unit in a semi-shared space that only myself and other strata members have access to. 

 

Our WiFi has always sucked, top floor is great, middle floor totally passable, basement was unusable. I recently installed a TP-link AC1750 with DHCP disabled and run a secondary SSID off the cat5e in the basement. When I did some renos in the basement I was able to wire cat6 into the walls so this single drop distributes to our home theater, computers, NAS, consoles, etc with hardwired connections through a switch.

 

So questions:

1: Will Telus as part of the installation be willing to relocate the modem to another place in the house? Does it run off coax or telephone cables? (or something else entirely?)

2: If not able to relocate the modem, would they install an additional jack for the ethernet somewhere? I am considering running the modem in bridge mode and putting the TP-Link router in charge, hopefully positioned in the middle of the house to eliminate the annoying dual SSIDs that don't hand-off nicely.

3: Can anyone help me understand why my 5ghz network coverage is so infrequent? We have minimal amounts of wireless devices in our house and problem has persisted through both Telus and Shaw, plus supplied modem/routers and the TPlink. Signal strength can be perfect with zero obvious drops but every so often (say once or twice per hour) the service will full stop over 5ghz band for about 5 minutes then return to full speed (180mb down on shaw currently). No warning, no change in signal strength, just loses connection to net. 2.4ghz doesn't do this and runs all day every day but at a slower speed. Due to the layout of our house and complex my nearest neighbors are 25+ feet away and wifi scans don't show much interference around me.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Nighthawk
Community Power User
Community Power User
  1. If you are switching to fiber, the connection will not use the existing phone lines or coax to come in to the house. A separate fiber line will be run. The location will be hard to pinpoint as it will depend on where the fiber line will come into the townhouse. Having the existing network lines throughout the house will be a benefit to you.
  2. Additional jacks may come at a cost. If you don't want dual SSIDs you can just disable the wireless on the Telus gateway if you're planning to use your own router. Bridging the Telus gateway isn't necessarily required for that setup. If you are getting Optik TV as well and end up with a wireless set top box, the wireless on the gateway will need to stay on. Have you considered wireless extenders or mesh networking? You can cover a whole house with one SSID. Telus does have a lower cost option that does work quite well.
  3. 5GHz just simply dropping isn't common. Is it just the TP-Link router you're experiencing this with? One thing to remember is 5GHz wireless connections have a shorter range and can be more easily interfered with by dense solid objects (concrete, metal, HVAC, electrical, etc). 

If you find a post useful, please give the author a "Like" or mark as an accepted solution if it solves your trouble. 🙂

View solution in original post

3 REPLIES 3

Nighthawk
Community Power User
Community Power User
  1. If you are switching to fiber, the connection will not use the existing phone lines or coax to come in to the house. A separate fiber line will be run. The location will be hard to pinpoint as it will depend on where the fiber line will come into the townhouse. Having the existing network lines throughout the house will be a benefit to you.
  2. Additional jacks may come at a cost. If you don't want dual SSIDs you can just disable the wireless on the Telus gateway if you're planning to use your own router. Bridging the Telus gateway isn't necessarily required for that setup. If you are getting Optik TV as well and end up with a wireless set top box, the wireless on the gateway will need to stay on. Have you considered wireless extenders or mesh networking? You can cover a whole house with one SSID. Telus does have a lower cost option that does work quite well.
  3. 5GHz just simply dropping isn't common. Is it just the TP-Link router you're experiencing this with? One thing to remember is 5GHz wireless connections have a shorter range and can be more easily interfered with by dense solid objects (concrete, metal, HVAC, electrical, etc). 

If you find a post useful, please give the author a "Like" or mark as an accepted solution if it solves your trouble. 🙂

Thank you for the detailed response!

1: Interesting, I thought the fibre only went to our shared electrical common room and not directly into my unit. If so that might open up a bit of freedom to have things installed where I want but as you say, that will depend on a few things, primarily I'd guess is where does it enter the house. My old internet 50 used the bonded pairs and enters on the third floor.

2: the dual SSID came of necessity in trying to get coverage over the whole house. The original setup with Telus had a the actiontec modem upstairs. They later provided a range extender that I put in the basement allowing overlapping signals for the mid-floor. Shaw did not provide an extender so I placed the Hitron modem upstairs and bought the TP-Link router for the basement. Again for overlapping signals when on mid-floor (our most commonly used space).

We have no Ethernet ports on the center floor of the house sadly, I am trying to find ways to add one but my layout will not make it easy. I will also try to research the mesh networking option. I might have a poor understanding of range extender but I do know when I tried using the Telus one we had issues when moving around the house. ie: if I was in basement with full signal strength, move to third floor and sit in chair beside upstairs router but the device would still be clinging to the basement signal. With dual SSID we found it easy to glance and see the issue and switch over, but it is still inconvenient (a first world problem that annoys the wife and therefore annoys me!)

3: 5g dropping has happened on all devices. Telus Internet 50 actiontec modem, as well as the range extender. On Shaw both our Hitron and TP-Link have issues. From what I can tell all 5g signal is effected. So if my "basement 5ghz" cuts out the "upstairs 5ghz" also drops. 2.4ghz keeps on trucking on both basement and upstairs ssid. This makes me suspect interference but haven't yet found a source and it happens if I'm sitting 2' away from the connected router or 20'.

I have tried many options over the years and gone through many of the frustrations you have.  I started using a mesh system a little over a year ago and I am the happiest I've ever been.  The one I use is the NetGear Orbi.  I have one base unit and two satellites.  The computer I'm using now is wired through a docking station to one of the satellites but we also have quite a few devices on wireless.  No problems.  I can't speak for every solution, but the mesh solution has done it for me, and the advice you've been given by nighthawk is very good.