Why Does This Hub Suck So?
This is the BT Home Hub. It’s a nice white box with blinky lights on the front, a phone, and a load of cables coming out of the box. It is also one of the singularly worst pieces of communications hardware it has ever been my misfortune to have to deal with.
The Home Hub is BT’s “plug-and-play” router for home users, and indeed it does have some plug-and-play elements. If you plug in the power supply and the ADSL cable, it connects to the internet for you with zero configuration. Shove in an ethernet cable and it sets itself as a default gateway router through DHCP, or it serves as a WiFi hotspot. At least, all this happens with the latest software.
When we got it, it had the original software. Oh joy of joys, this needed configuring through a terrible user interface. We were promised it would get better though, it had automatic updating! Sure enough, a few weeks later, it was updated with the new user interface, better stability, automatic configuration and so on.
Well, automatic except for everything else. Whenever your hub is reset to the factory settings, it forgets extra things you have as addons. This means that our IP phone stopped working until we re-activated it.
Now it’s March, and I suddenly discover that the box hasn’t been doing its automatic update thing for some reason and we were stuck on firmware 6.2.2.6 two versions behind the current one, and we lacked several updates including improved admin interface (so I can prod it though Safari), better port-forwarding, UPnP fixes, stability fixes, and BT FON. After some horrible mucking about with the re-flash tool to force an update (It doesn’t work properly under Mac OS 10.5, or Windows Vista, and requires you to change all your network settings), we had the box in the factory defaults state. Fortunately it managed to re-configure the internet connection without problem. However, the IP phone and FON settings were nowhere to be found, and we had to re-activate the phone (This was quite quick) and opt-in to FON again. We’re still waiting for the box to realise it is supposed to have FON enabled, and I’m not even sure the v1 hardware we have supports FON. The software does, as of 6.2.6.E.
So, how difficult is it to make the box check back with its home server once every 24 hours, preferably between 3am and 5am when people are asleep, and look for new updates then double check any config changes. We shouldn’t have to wait three days for a new service to activate.
Tags: !automatic, broadband, BT, Home Hub, internet, modem, router, update, WiFi