BT Whole Home Wifi - looking for advice on integrating into existing setup

itm

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My home networking is a little more complex than usual, and I am thinking of investing in BT Whole Home Wifi to both simplify it and improve my wifi coverage around my 3-storey house and garden. I was wondering if someone could advise on how best to implement the BT system to make the best use of my existing infrastructure.

My setup is as follows:

- Virgin Media hub running in modem mode, connected to the primary router - an Asus RT-AC68U. Both are in the study the the middle of the ground floor. The signal from the RT-AC68U doesn't extend well to either the front of the house (where I have a video doorbell) or the back garden (where I like to sit and surf/stream in the summer).

- A 24-port switch also in the study, which the Asus router is plugged into.

- Cat6 cabling from the switch in the study (via a patch panel in the study) to a number of different locations:
- the lounge at the rear of the house, where it is connected to a 12-port switch. My AV equipment in the lounge is connected to this switch
- the dining room on the first floor, at the front of the house
- the kitchen on the first floor, at the back of the house
- the bedroom on the 2nd floor, at the back of the house.

My questions are:

- Must the first BT disc be connected directly to the Asus router, or can it be connected to the 12-port switch in the lounge (which is uplinked to the 24-port switch in the study, which in turn is connected to the Asus router)? The reason being that this would maximise the number of wifi points available to me, as I could continue to use the wifi on the Asus router to provide good wifi coverage in the study, while using the BT discs to service the rest of the ground floor of the house (particularly the back garden and front of house).

- I have a couple of devices which can only be used with other devices which are on the same wifi network (e.g. the Chromecast and the video doorbell). If the Chromecast and video doorbell are connected to BT discs, but my phone is connected to the wifi on the Asus router, will these devices behave as though they are connected to the same wifi network?
 
- Must the first BT disc be connected directly to the Asus router, or can it be connected to the 12-port switch in the lounge (which is uplinked to the 24-port switch in the study, which in turn is connected to the Asus router)? The reason being that this would maximise the number of wifi points available to me, as I could continue to use the wifi on the Asus router to provide good wifi coverage in the study, while using the BT discs to service the rest of the ground floor of the house (particularly the back garden and front of house).
No, as long as it's logically connected that's fine. I've put in a BT WH system where the discs are connected to the router by homeplug links. It works fine. The one thing to watch out for is that you will not get roaming device management between the Asus WiFi and the BT WH WiFi. When a client device is connected to the BT WH WiFi, and it changes location, the discs work out which will give it the best connection and pass the client device between them. This won't happen between the Asus WiFi and BT WH WiFi, even if they have the same SSID/password.

- I have a couple of devices which can only be used with other devices which are on the same wifi network (e.g. the Chromecast and the video doorbell). If the Chromecast and video doorbell are connected to BT discs, but my phone is connected to the wifi on the Asus router, will these devices behave as though they are connected to the same wifi network?
Unless you have some additional routing between the Asus and the BT WH discs, they are part of the same logical network and it should all work fine.
 

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