TL;DR The Hub 3 is causing the issues.
A few months ago my 5 year old Hub 3 started dropping connection frequently. I managed to book an engineer and Virgin agreed to replace my Hub 3 with a new one.
All was fine until a couple of days later I started getting issues with two particular Bluetooth peripherals; an Apple mouse and keyboard. They would just randomly drop connection, sometimes every minute. Just imagine how frustrating this is when working.
After months of troubleshooting (I have a lot of smart home networking stuff going on) I tried to eliminate every source of possible interference by switching off home network devices for hours at a time and if the dropouts persisted I could safely say “this one isn’t causing the issue”, etc. For a while I thought it may be channel interference with a neighbour’s router, there are one or two giving very strong signals when I check in the macOS networking pane.
Anyway, I eventually concluded that the culprit was the Hub 3. If I switch that off completely, I get no Bluetooth dropout issues.
What I suspect may be happening is the auto channel switching is causing this, say when it detects a neighbour’s router and switches to avoid a conflict. Equally when I turn off smart switching and manually select channels this may still be the case, i.e, the neighbour’s router has switched to the same channel. But I just can’t understand why I never has this issue before and why it only seems to effect those two peripherals. For 5 years and beyond I had no issues until this Hub 3 was swapped out for a new one so could this Hub 3 simply be defective or its firmware is different and causing the issue?
I’ve tried and exhausted so many channel configurations, also killing 5GHz just leaving 2.4GHz and vice-versa. Sometimes it felt like setting channels manually seemed to do the trick, but either; almost immediately, later that day, or the next day, the dropouts starting happening again. Sometime weeks will go by with no issue at all. It’s baffling.
I am now considering perhaps a third-party router will help (using the Hub 3 in modem mode). But I thought I’d check in here and see if anyone had any thoughts. It is a maddening and frustrating experience to have work constantly interrupted by these drop outs. Any advice appreciated.
