Hands-on troubleshooting guides for Virgin Media, Sky, BT, EE and more, written and tested by Graeme Messina.
A TalkTalk Wi-Fi Hub says almost everything through one light on the front. There is no row of labelled indicators for power, broadband and Wi-Fi, so that single LED has to carry the whole story throu...
A Plusnet hub tells you what is wrong before you open a single settings page, provided you know which colour maps to which fault. The trouble is that Plusnet ships two very different designs. The Hub ...
A Sky hub in the hallway and a back bedroom with one bar is one of the most common complaints in British homes, and the shops are full of boxes promising to fix it. Most of those boxes will fix it. So...
The Smart Hub 2 is a competent box, and it is also the reason a lot of BT Full Fibre homes put up with a dead bedroom, no VPN at the router and a settings page that hides half of what a keen user want...
A TalkTalk home phone that goes quiet after the move to Full Fibre is nearly always a wiring or registration problem rather than a broken line. Digital Voice carries calls over the broadband connectio...
The letters have started arriving, the adverts mention a switch-off, and the home phone still works exactly as it always has. That combination leaves plenty of households unsure whether anything reall...
Plusnet supplies the Hub Two, and it is a perfectly serviceable box for a small flat. It is also the reason plenty of Plusnet customers put up with dead spots upstairs, a settings page that will not d...
Hyperoptic faults behave differently from the rest of the UK broadband market, and that is why generic advice so often fails on them. There is no phone line, no microfilter and no master socket to tes...
Logging in to a Hyperoptic router means opening the settings panel built into the Hyperhub, the box Hyperoptic supplies with its full fibre packages. From there you can rename your WiFi, set a new wir...
Running a VPN on your router is the tidiest way to cover every device in the house at once, including the smart TVs and consoles that cannot install an app of their own. It is also the step most peopl...
Most people searching for a VPN for Virgin Media want one clear answer, not a padded list of five affiliates that all pay the same commission. Virgin runs on fast cable, so the VPN has to keep up with...
Logging into a TalkTalk router is the way to rename the Wi-Fi, set a new password, check what is connected and turn on parental controls. The steps are the same across the current Wi-Fi Hub and Wi-Fi ...
A smart TV that refuses to join the WiFi is one of the most common home network complaints, and the advice online tends to jump straight to a factory reset or a new router. Neither is where to start. ...
The router admin password is the login that opens your router's own settings, and it is not the same thing as the WiFi password most people reach for first. The WiFi password (also called the network ...
A wireless printer that will not connect to WiFi is one of the most common home-network headaches, and it almost always looks worse than it is. The printer sits there refusing every network, the passw...
The Plusnet Hub Manager is the settings page built into every Plusnet hub, and it is where you rename the WiFi, set a new password, check what is connected and set up parental controls. Reaching it ta...
A phone that refuses to connect to WiFi is frustrating precisely because the network is usually working. Other devices are online, the router lights look normal, yet this one phone shows the network a...
A Windows laptop that will not connect to WiFi is frustrating precisely because it feels like a broadband fault when it usually is not. When the phones, tablets and other machines in the house are onl...
WiFi that keeps dropping is one of the most maddening faults in a home, partly because it feels random and partly because the internet is full of advice that jumps straight to buying new kit. The good...
A laptop that drops WiFi every few minutes while the phones, tablets and TVs in the same house stay online is telling you something useful: the broadband is fine, and the fault lives on the laptop. Th...
Virgin Media broadband is fast at the socket, but the Hub's WiFi has a reputation for cutting out, and the causes are specific enough that generic advice rarely lands. A Hub that keeps dropping the co...
BT WiFi that keeps dropping is frustrating precisely because the broadband itself is usually fine. The Smart Hub 2 stays connected to BT while phones, laptops and smart-home gadgets lose signal, which...
The TP-Link Deco E4 is one of the cheapest whole-home mesh systems on sale, and cheap mesh has a reputation for promising coverage it cannot deliver. This review is based on hands-on use rather than a...
Setting up or adjusting a TP-Link range extender means opening its own settings panel, which lives on the extender rather than anywhere on the internet. TP-Link gives that panel a friendly address, tp...
Browse everything by category: WiFi · Internet · Hardware · Smart Home · Cybersecurity · DIY