Connection of Ethernet cable

[jenfamily1]

My son's room often has poor signal at times of the day and I'm unable to connect from there to the two other Tivo boxes in our house.I have a very long Ethernet cable which I thought by connecting into a spare terminal at the rear of the router and the other end into my son's Tivo ethernet would bypass the weak wi fi signal but it makes no difference. Am I supposed to change any settings on his Tivo box in order to strengthen the signal or won't this idea fix the problem?

What advantage is there to connecting an Ethernet cable between the router and a Tivo box?

Many thanks

[jenfamily1]

At the moment my internet keeps coming and going so if a moderator is monitoring please get in touch.
Basically my issue is when I try to connect to either my son's V6 next door or the downstairs box to watch something which has been recorded if the signal is below 25% it won't connect and the ethernet cable isn't making any difference.I may have to turn everything off when I'm alone!!!!!

[japitts]

Are both the donor & recipient boxes V6? I'm assuming so, but explicit confirmation would be useful.

And both are Ethernet connected?

What are the error codes on the recipient box when you try streaming from the donor box?

[Hayley_S]

Hello @jenfamily1,

Welcome back! Thanks for posting.

I am sorry to see that you are having issues connecting your TV box, have you tried doing a pinhole reset on your Hub? If not can you try this for me? 

Many thanks,

[jenfamily1]

Sorry haven't responded earlier. Been away since Monday at a wedding in Wales. Yes the recipient & donor boxes are V6 and I did connect the ethernet cable from the rear spare port of the router to the recipient ( the problem one in my son's room ) box at the rear. I trust this was correct?

I was told earlier that one can't connect two V6 boxes together via an ethernet cable?

I can't remember the error code right now but will check over the weekend. All I can remember is that with the ethernet connected between hub & box, I'm unable to view the 'my shows' from the downstairs ( donor box? )

[jenfamily1]

Hi Hayley. Been away since Monday but did try the 'pinhole' reset last Saturday and although the internet connection hasn't fluctuated since I haven't been able to try to connect my son's box with the living room one, simply because of being away and not being able to. At the weekend if his signal is poor I'll try reconnection of the ethernet cable to see if anything has improved since the 'reset' was carried out.

[japitts]

The Ethernet connection on a V6 is for the internet link which comes via your homehub - it's not for connecting directly to another V6.

In some previous posts you seemed to be expecting to see a signal strength readout when using an Ethernet cable, a good analogy would be using a landline phone inplace of a mobile phone and asking if that improves the signal. Wireless signal strength is only relevant over a wireless connection, and one of the reasons for always recommending an Ethernet cable connection for multiroom & internet streaming is to eliminate all the variables and issues that are inherent with wireless.

Check the error code and report back as and when.

[jenfamily1]

Yes, I had remembered that between the boxes the cable shouldn't be connected. I too would have expected the strength of the signal to significantly improve and have also realised that one doesn't receive a signal read out ,only an ip address to show connectivity
I'm very busy again this weekend but perhaps either Sunday evening or next week when my son moves out again I'll try and report back to you

[jenfamily1]

Hi John,
It looks like a moderator has seen my posts and seems to be saying there are issues with restricted power down streaming??? ( words to that effect) and probably will send a technician here as it can't be fixed remotely. I've discovered something else weird in that my No.2 son's room which normally has the poor signal was able to connect with our lounge V6 box when signal was 18% poor, yet next door in No.1 son's bedroom ( situated directly above the hub in the hall) had 81% signal ( excellent ) and yet his box wouldn't connect to the lounge V6 despite switching off the boxes and restarting them Tried both boxes today whilst both their signals were 'marginal' 32% and both connected to the lounge V6.I'll refer back to the ethernet cable if I'm unable to receive 'catch up' at any time and give you the error code.

[japitts]

I see you've got another thread here relating to broadband issues. That will be having zero impact on your live TV or multiroom streaming, it's different connections involved. OnDemand on each individual box uses the internet and that could be impacted, but multiroom streaming uses the following set of connections:

V6 box 1 <---> Hub <----> V6 box 2. No internet involved. OnDemand uses.... V6 box 1 <---> Hub <---> Internet.

The signal strengths you're checking here, are between the V6 and the hub - anything below 50% (IMO) has potential for problems sooner or later - the strengths you've reported will not be helping the issues one bit, and could well be the underlying cause. You can restart any individual box as many times as you like, but if the WiFi signal is poor - then that's what you need to fix. A bit like rebooting a mobile phone to "reattach" to the network when the signal strength is poor.

[jenfamily1]

Hi John and many thanks again for your advice. I have ( for what it's worth ) a technician calling this evening and I have listed all your / other helpful people's points .I have replaced the Cat5 for a Cat6 anyway.
I have done a BQM test and got 188Mbps download speed and 21 upload. I just wanted to confirm that as connection to multi room V6 boxes doesn't involve the internet, what causes / makes the wifi signal which is generally poor? Is it the hub not doing its job properly?