bt

BT Home Hub 4 Review

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BT Home Hub 4

I’ve got my hands on a brand new BT Home Hub 4. This is the latest update to BT’s own-brand wireless router that it provides to its broadband customers. We’ve been with BT broadband since we moved to Sowerby Bridge in November 2010, and, apart from one broken promise regarding an activation date for the flat move we’ve had no problems.

During this time we’ve had an older model – the BT Home Hub 2 (model B), which is fine – but this newer model is better. Namely it supports dual-channel Wifi, so as well as using the 2.4 GHz channel, it supports the 5 GHz channel. Devices which can use the 5 GHz channel can therefore run at faster speeds – theoretically 300 Mbps is possible.

BT Home Hub 4 unboxing

Unboxing

I’ve posted a few unboxing photos on Flickr. The most interesting thing about the box is that it is designed to fit through a letterbox – therefore, customers won’t have to wait around for a delivery or have to retrieve packages from their local sorting office a day later. It didn’t fit through our letterbox, but that’s because we live in a flat and ours is tiny – I imagine most people with a proper letterbox will be fine.

Inside the box, the Home Hub is in one compartment, and the cables and manuals are in the other. You get a Cat5e ethernet cable, a modem cable, microfilter, and a USB wifi dongle. The dongle enables dual-band Wifi on computers which may not otherwise have it, although unfortunately it’s only compatible with Windows Vista, 7 and 8. The manuals are brief, and just cover what you need to set it up and some troubleshooting.

BT Home Hub 2 (left) and BT Home Hub 4 (right)

The BT Home Hub 4

Physically the BT Home Hub 4 is quite small – it’s wide, but shorter and thinner than the BT Home Hub 2, on the left in the picture. It also looks nice, which is what you want from a device that is most likely in your front room, and carries on the good design that BT have had in its routers. It’s also very light.

The back of the router has an RJ11 socket for the modem cable, and five RJ45 sockets. One of these supports gigabit ethernet, and three others support standard 100 Mbps 100BaseTX ethernet. The fifth is a WAN socket for BT Infinity customers – unfortunately BT haven’t upgraded our exchange for fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) so we have to use standard ADSL. There’s also a USB port, for which there’s no documentation but apparently you can connect a printer or hard drive to it and it will be shared across the network. And finally, unlike our current model, the BT Home Hub 4 has an on/off switch, so there’s no need to pull the cable out.

On the top, there’s a reset button, and a button to use WPS – Wifi Protected Setup. This allows compatible devices to automatically configure themselves without needing a password, and indeed the USB wifi dongle provided also supports WPS. And there’s a holder for the card with your SSID, default wireless key and admin password, which is handy.

Once everything is plugged in, it’s time to turn it on. There’s a pleasant single light at the front, which initially glows green, then orange whilst starting up, and then blue when it’s ready to go. If there’s a problem, then some red or orange icons appear in the silver strip below. This is different to the BT Home Hub 2 where there were five icons that were illuminated all of the time.

Connecting for the first time

The first page of the setup screen for the BT Home Hub 4.

The first time a device connects, the web browser is redirected to a setup screen. By default, this happens with every new device, although thankfully a mobile-optimised version is available for smartphones. You can turn this off later so that new devices connect straightaway. The main purpose of this is to ask whether you want to install parental control software, as current UK guidelines for ISPs seemingly require.

The admin panel

BT Home Hub admin error

Logging into the admin panel for the first time gave me an error: ‘Sessions Number – no more than 100 sessions at a time are allowed. Please wait until open sessions expire.‘ Clicking ‘Retry’ or any of the options didn’t make any difference. This problem affects other BT Home Hubs, but thankfully it’s easily solved by doing the usual thing of turning it off, and then turning it back on again.

The admin panel on the BT Home Hub 4 is largely unchanged from previous models. Whilst BT have dramatically redesigned the outside, the admin panel uses the same basic design as before, but with a few more advanced settings to go with the extra features. However, the default settings are pretty good for everyone so there’s no real need to change them. OpenDNS users may be disappointed that it still isn’t possible to change the default DNS servers on the BT Home Hub 4.

Speed

BT Home Hub admin panel - speed

The device reported that it had managed to connect at a very reasonable 23.15 Mbps downstream – faster than the BT Home Hub 2 which managed around 17 Mbps. Upstream speeds are low but this is to be expected on a consumer-grade ADSL connection. We’re fortunate that we live very close to our exchange – we’re only around 200-300 metres away.

Speedtest.net results

And thankfully the actual speeds aren’t far off – here’s a link to my SpeedTest.net result. Essentially 20 Mbps, which is a notable improvement, and not far off the limits of ADSL technology. I also pinged www.google.com 20 times and the average round trip time was 23ms; the longest was 25ms so it’s pretty consistent.

As for Wifi speeds, they seem fine. We have five Wi-fi devices in our flat – my Mac Mini, iPhone 5, iPad, Christine’s Acer laptop and Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone. My iPhone 5 and iPad both support the 5 GHz channel, but the others don’t – which in the case of the Galaxy S3 is a little odd in my opinion. We briefly tried the USB Wifi dongle on Christine’s laptop but it didn’t seem to like it – I may need to do some further investigations. My iPad still had a good signal at the furthest point away from the router in our flat, which is a distance of around 20 metres with several walls in the way.

One minor disappointment, from a geek perspective, is that the BT Home Hub 4 doesn’t appear to support IPv6, either on the home network or on the internet.

Summary

Overall I like the new unit. It’s smaller size is nice, and it looks good. Most importantly, it seems to perform well, with good speeds both on the internet and the home network. New BT Broadband customers will get the BT Home Hub 4 as standard, and existing customers can currently upgrade for £35, plus an extra £9 for the USB Wifi dongle.

My unit was given to me for free by a PR company acting on behalf of BT, in return for writing this review. However, these are my honest opinions, and I would recommend the upgrade if you need faster or more reliable Wifi speeds.

A rant about BT

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Communication

Earlier this week I said that our flat move had gone well and in particular that our phone line would be activated on Thursday, i.e. yesterday. It hasn’t.

Christine got a voicemail message from BT (with whom we have our phone and broadband) asking her to ring them. After being on hold for quite a while, someone finally answered, but initially didn’t know why we ringing. Eventually, we were told that there was a problem with the phone line and that the activation would have to be put back. We could have a working phone by Friday (today), but with a different telephone number, and that the broadband wouldn’t be working until Thursday next week – a week later than we’d been told originally.

To make it worse, we’re not receiving a discount on the monthly bill for the time (nearly 2 weeks) when we’ve been unable to use our phone line or broadband, so we’re effectively paying for a service that we aren’t getting.

Initially I had praise for the way BT handled our move – our first call to them assured us that it would be a quick, simple process which would allow us to keep our number. A few days without phone and internet access would be inconvenient but understandable. But having no internet for the best part of two weeks seems excessive, especially as there’s no financial compensation. And really, does it take a whole week for someone to drive over to our local exchange and press a few buttons?

The problem isn’t necessarily with BT Retail, with whom we pay the contract with, but seemingly with BT Openreach, the subsidiary of BT which owns and operates the telephone lines and exchanges in the UK. To me, they seem to be a very expensive and inefficient outfit which only serves its own shareholders, i.e. the BT Group. Although it’s regulated by Ofcom, other parties have very little say in how it’s run.

In Britain, we don’t have that many alternatives to broadband via phone lines. Virgin Media’s cable network is good, but generally limited to large towns and cities – no good for my small town. Wireless broadband over 3G mobile networks is an option: prices are coming down to be comparable with fixed-line internet, there’s no need to install anything apart from plugging in a Mifi router and they can even be bought on pay-as-you-go contracts. But wireless suffers from latency issues, making it poor for use in online gaming, and again, it’s not always available. We’re also some years away from better and faster 4G networks.

Maybe it’s high time for the ownership of Openreach to change; its shares could be split amongst the other large ISPs in the UK (Sky, Talktalk, Orange, Virgin Media etc.) so that all have a say in how its run; it could be made a not-for-dividend company answerable to Ofcom like Network Rail for the railways; or completely re-nationalised. The last one is a long-shot, but any of those should improve accountability to its direct customers (the ISPs) and regular home users.

In the meantime, I’ve paid for an extra 2 GB of data to be added on to my mobile contract with 3 for this month. Thankfully it only costs £5, and 3 don’t charge extra for internet tethering or using your phone as a personal hotspot, so I’m only partially out of pocket. I’ll still be pointing this out to BT in a letter.

In an age when I can order a book at half 4 in the afternoon, and have it on my desk at work at half 9 the following morning, how does it take so long for phone lines to be connected? Is BT’s equipment really that old and archaic, or is their lack of accountability and need to shore up profit margins the driving force here?