Readers’ comments
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At a BT Premium
I have a couple of comments about your mesh extenders Labs ( see issue 309, p72). Firstly, the BT offering tested was the standard version of Whole Home Wi-Fi, which is a dual-band setup and can’t compete on speed with the tri-band systems that you reviewed.
However, BT does offer a tri-band system in the shape of Premium Whole Home Wi-Fi. The backhaul uses 802.11ax (or Wi-Fi 6), meaning it should be fast. I’d love to see a test of this system using the same methodology you used to test the other extenders. Also, each of the Premium units has two Ethernet sockets and I think the stands are removable, which immediately addresses two specific criticisms you had about the standard version.
Secondly, you devoted a page to other technologies such as powerline networking ( see issue 309, p81). What many people don’t realise is that these cause the mains wiring to radiate radio frequency (RF), which can interfere with the DSL signals on your phone line, depending on where exactly the phone and power lines are routed.
I’ve lived in three houses over the past three years and all behaved very differently – one had no issues, but with another I had to pull the faceplate off the phone socket and plug the router into the test socket to avoid having a long “dead leg” in the wiring that halved the sync speed. Jim Hatfield
Intel was scoping out whether to move to 7nm fabrication, they must have looked over to the competition and thought “nothing to worry about there” and complacency set in.
I’m sat here writing this on an Apple MacBook Pro – with its eighth-generation “Coffee Lake” quad-core Intel i7 CPU running at 2.7GHz with 16GB of 2,133MHz LPDDR3 RAM – and on a daily basis, I see it splutter and wheeze its way through the most basic tasks, all the time waiting for the fan to signal its deafening roar of submission. Is it any wonder that Apple is ditching Intel for ARM…
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