BT home hub thing

[tigersaw]

Trying to sort out 1,000,000 things having exchanged contracts on new house.

Time to sort out the phone.

Easiest thing to do with the phone is get one of those option 3 home hub contracts, free hub and xbox wireless usb thingy. Already with BT, so if I order now it should be easy enough and I should have it installed quick.

Anyone know if the hub thing is reliable, can you change the WEP security yourself or is it fixed, and can you sling the thing and put old router back if nescessary, or is it dedicated?
Will I still be able download US shows from bittorrent for Hel, (who likes to be first with the lost/niptuck/house/greys/housewives gossip)
Not interested in the hub phone, everyone says thats complete ****e.

By default, the box ships with WEP, but you can change it to WPA if you like. However, you might find that the connection drops pretty frequently, depending on the firmware version. Mac's have a bigger problem with WPA to the BT Home Hub (every 15mins it drops the connection, latest firmware).

You can use a standard DECT phone with the hub, but I wouldn't recommend it. Not unless you want to be cut off every other minute anyway.

The hub has 2 eth ports on it, so if you NEEDED to, you could jack in here to use wifi & routing capabilities from your old box, and the modem from the BT Hub. I'm not sure why you'd need the BT Hub to be honest in that situation.

Early models of the hub can't talk at ADSL2 speeds properly, and they can affect your main line's incoming calls.

The wifi signal on the hub is underpowered, unless you tinker Could be a problem depending on the design of your house. Think carefully about placement of the Hub Again, this could only be early models, I'm not sure. Play about with the channel settings a little if this is an issue for you. I'm sure I have some TX diag's somewhere for the BT Hub....

Logging into the Hub can cause faults in PSAPI.DLL, but only if you're using IE7 that I know of.

The hub has 3 user accounts, one for day to day use, one for your administrative duties, one for tech support use. Bare that in mind if you play with the box. If tech support don't have access, you don't have tech support!

Some units aren't shipped with a time server setting, meaning your call logs aren't accurate, but that's simple to sort out really.

Flashing the firmware on it is pretty useless on the whole, because they run off & download the latest firmware periodically, if you don't keep up to date with codecs, bye bye connection. However, you can safely use a different modem/router, you just sacrifice a lot of functionality (broadband phone line etc).

Customer service & technical support. Well, it's BT. Enough said Don't expect the order tracking system to work properly, that's a feature, not a bug!

As for downloading torrents, the Hub supports port forwarding, so it shouldn't be an issue. BT's traffic shaping could be though.

HTH

[tigersaw]

Hey, thanks fro the detailed reply.
Its sounds a pain from what you tell me! Not interested in the broadband phone anyway, the 'free' calls cost 3p anyway, against the normal 5p, so why bother, the quality is poor from what I'm told.
This dropping out business bothers me though, I want a stable and reliable connection, my current connection usually runs for a few months without stalling..
Still, you might be the guy to talk to if I get one

[timwilky]

Err. how do you know your new home will be capable of an ASDL service. (Unless of course there is already one in use).

Interesting the number of providers who say yes the exchange is enabled and then refuse when they find out the the local loop bit aint all that local

[tigersaw]

Originally Posted by timwilky

Err. how do you know your new home will be capable of an ASDL service. (Unless of course there is already one in use).

I used http://www.broadbandchecker.co.uk/broadband-checker.php and typed in their phone number and postcode

[timwilky]

ok. But I know from personal grief with BT that it is not always possible.

I had a BT line installed and ordered an ASDL service that was eventually refused due to line losses. I ended up having an engineers visit that confirmed that I would never be capable of getting ASDL due to the line quality. So I then tried to cancel the BT line and they kept going on about 12 month contract and would not accept that because the line was not capable of providing an ASDL service that it was not fit for purpose.