Many months ago I purchased an HP Photosmart 5520 Wireless printer/scanner to use in the home office. Initially it ran very well but as we were doing some work on the house I simply plugged it in whenever I happened to need it. Once the building work had finished the printer was installed in a more permanent position and the problems started to reveal themselves.
Quite often you would be able to print then 30 minutes later the printer would have disappeared from the network resulting in a reboot of both the printer and the Homehub. Mostly this solved the issue but seriously dented the “convenience” of a wireless printer.
I initially tried playing around with the printers own settings to no avail. After this I went to the HP forums to see if anyone else had a similar problem but was left feeling largely underwhlemed by the support experience which generally gave people a huge list of things to try that would have no bearing at all on the issues they were experiencing (With 20 years of IT support experience I feel qualified to make this statement). So the search began in earnest to try and find a solution myself.
My company, Pentangle, have been providing IT support to lots of companies for many years and we’d never been fully happy with any of the DSL routers in the marketplace. Even expensive kit like Cisco had it’s foibles so we set about building something to our own specs. Plenty of Googling later and someone far more technical then myself had built us a Tomato based router on an ASUS RT-16n box. Coupled with lots of fancy QoS rules it was ready to replace my BT Homehub.
Initially I setup the Tomato at home to test the performance benefits of the device over the BT home hub but had no idea that it was about to solve my printing headache! And Lo and behold the HP Photosmart 5520 has now started working faultlessly.
So, the solution it seems is to ditch the BT Homehub in favour of a different router. We’re testing out some NETGEAR equipment at the moment and hope to report back on that but if, in the meantime, you are desperate give Pentangle a call and order one of our routers!
PS I’ve been told this happens on the latest BT Homehub 4 too…
Shaun
Have the same problem with HH3 and HP 5520 printer. Only way to fix is to reboot router. Also lose access to my smart TV at times. All loiks okay but it is like router goes deaf to printer or TV.
Looking for a replacement router right now.
Any ideas welcome.
Alun
So far with friends I’ve either given them an ASUS unit running s custom tomato firmware (circa £100) or we’ve used NETGEAR units.
Both have been good and solved the issues.
You should be able to get a Netgear unit on eBay for peanuts to try it out.
Jim
I’m having this with my HP ENVY 4500 – it seemed fine for the first few weeks but in the last 3-4 days I’ve lost it from the network twice and only solution is to reboot my home hub
Alun
Hi Jim,
Pain that it is I’d certainly try a replacement router.
My preference is NETGEAR or my company sell the ASUS routers with our own customised version of Tomato on it
A