Hi,
Sorry for the lengthy post.
Now that we have hot sunny weather I have found a reoccurring issue with my broadband dropping out from around 12:30 up until around 16:00 every time we have a hot clear day. This is pretty annoying and inconvenient when requiring internet access from home.
I have found that the issue is related to the Omnibox itself, which is positioned in a location that it is in direct sunlight during the same time period as the internet connection drops. So during this time I have no internet until the sun moves around far enough that the box is out of direct sunlight and cools down, at which point the connection comes back up.
To prove this, I have measured the temperature of the brown Omnibox case during an outage and it was measuring over 67°C and was too hot to touch for any amount of time, the outdoor temperature at the time was 28°C. I then lightly sprayed the box with my hosepipe for a couple of minutes to cool it down, and instantly my connection was restored. Following this, i am now having to manually cool the Omnibox down with water every time it drops during the day when I require to use the internet. This generally resolves the issue for about an hour, before it then heats up by the sun again and drops the connection.
Unfortunately I have no way of shading this myself due to its location on the side of the house next to the driveway.
I have also set up BQM to monitor the outages, details of which can be found below:
BQM - Sunday 18th July
BQM - Monday 19th July - At approximately 2pm, I sprayed the Omnibox lightly with water too cool it, you can see the connection then came back up.
BQM - Tuesday 20th July - At approximately 12:00 and again at 2pm I cooled the Omnibox down, and both times the connection came back up (until it overheated again).
BQM - Wednesday 21st July - Slightly cloudier day, so outage didn't last as long.
BQM - Thursday 22nd July
I had an engineer out today and after explaining it to him, they advised they had seen similar issues with these overheating and swapped out the Boostral 610 RFoG node for the newer Boostral 710 to try and resolve the issue. I also suggested (at the recommendation of a friend) maybe replacing the Omnibox housing with one of the white variety to reflect the heat, which I have also seen someone else on this forum mention they had done previously. He did not have one of the white boxes on his van, so said he will check with their stores and come back in a couple of hours, but unfortunately he has not returned.
As the specifications for the Boostral 710 RFoG node states an operating temperature range of -20°C to 50°C, I am not hopeful that this will resolve the issue. especially when the omnibox hit 67°C on a day that was only 28°C, I hate to think how much it will overheat on a day that is even hotter, with the inside of the box probably being much more than that.
Is there any possible way to request for the Omnibox casing to be replaced with a white one to try and at least reduce the temperature and resulting issues. Short of this, the omnibox itself will need moving to a more shaded location at the rear of the house (about 6metres away from its present location). As at present, I don't think having to go outside and cool it down with water is a very practical solution.
As a bit of background history, I was a previous customer almost exactly 2 years ago, and had this exact same issue at this time of year. Unfortunately the few engineers that came out did not identify the issue at the time as they just concentrated on the hub and noise levels, which it has now been identified was not the cause of the issue. As you were unable to fix the issue at that time, I had to leave a month or so after the service went live, as the outage was occurring daily through most of July and into August.
After signing up again to give you a second chance, I have been quite happy with the service, which has been pretty stable until the hot weather kicked in, and the same issues that made me leave previously have appeared again.
I will monitor the issue during the next bout of hot sunny weather we have but am not hopeful that the issue will be resolved. So, any help to get this permanently sorted would be much appreciated. Unfortunately going through the usual customer services route is painful, as they just seem interested in the Hub, and advised me to keep it out the sun, or trying to charge me £99 to move it, when the issue has nothing to do with the hub itself or its location in the house.
Many thanks,
Leigh
