Nick Jackson

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.

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A huge thanks to National Express, who have finally got the hang of this customer service thing in providing free WiFi on their East Coast train service. This is a welcome departure from GNER’s somewhat irritating “Pay us $100,000,000 for the privilege of connecting!” stance, however in the spirit of being big business they still ask for some information - namely your email address so that they may better spam you with unwanted offers.

Surely if you’re offering free WiFi, you may as well just leave it open and not require a HTML login form so that users with browserless devices (VoIP phones, for example) can take advantage. Oh well, it’s still better than nothing.