Gus’s Blog

I was quite pleased that the problems I experienced with my wireless connection had been resolved. However, at the time I was staying at my dad’s place, and I wondered whether or not I’d be affected by the same issue when I got home.

When I left, the BT Fon service hadn’t been activated, so I hadn’t seen any drop in performance of the connection between the laptop and the router before, but on my return I noticed that they’d finally got round to switching it on. If I’m honest, I rarely use the laptop when I’m at home (I far prefer a full-sized keyboard), but I thought I’d test it anyhow.

The first thing I checked was the firmware version – it was still showing 6.2.6.E. I then switched on the laptop and did some browsing. There appeared to be no problem at first, but I left it for a bit and then came back to discover that indeed the signal quality had deteriorated.

I wasn’t too concerned. At my dad’s I just rebooted the router and the next day it had automagically updated itself. I didn’t even have to do a reboot on my own – it just updated without any problems.

One thing that niggles, though – there is a utility that can be downloaded from BT, but a) it’s in an obscure location and can only be found by Googling and b) it only allows one to update to the E variant. I would suggest to BT that when they release the next version of the firmware, they perhaps add a facility on the router homepage itself allowing the user to initiate the download. For most people I would imagine the auto-update to be sufficient, but when I was experiencing major problems it was frustrating to have to wait for it to happen this way.

Just a thought.