BT Smart Hub review: The best ISP-supplied router bar none Is your home http://asklaughingjack.tumblr.com/ Wi-Fi slow and unreliable or unusable at range? The BT Smart Hub may well be the answer to all your wireless woes. Its BTs latest home router, the follow-up to the venerable Home Hub 5 and is, so the firm claims, the fastest router supplied by any of broadband company in the UK. Thats a pretty bold claim; the question is can investing in a new router really improve the performance of your internet connection at home that much? Do BTs claims hold water, or is it all down to the size of your house, what its built from and how much interference there is in your local area? The answer to these questions (sorry!) is that it depends, as it does with all wireless routers and extender products but it certainly doesnt hurt to have the most powerful router you can afford, and the BT Smart Hub, as well see, is more than beefy. Its a huge step up from most ISP-supplied devices. READ NEXT: Sky Q Sky's premium service is great for TV and Wi-Fi Price, features and setup First the good news. The BT Smart Hub is very reasonably priced, even free for some BT customers (although only, apparently, for new customers who haven't taken up any kind of discount). Existing customers can upgrade for a mere 50, and this is a price that, for a router this powerful, is amazing. Let me lay it out for you: BT's latest home router http://onlinegamesstuf.livejournal.com has a total of seven internal antennae, enabling 4x4 MIMO 802.11ac wireless in the 5GHz band and 3x3 MIMO over 2.4GHz. That means a theoretical top speed of 1,700Mbits/sec and 450Mbits/sec respectively a huge improvement over the 1,300Mbits/sec and 300Mbits/sec maximum of the previous Home Hub, and the more basic 3x3 MIMO of the Virgin Media Hub 3 and Sky Q Hub. The BT Smart Hub forges ahead in other ways, too. It has four Gigabit Ethernet ports on the rear where the Sky Hub has only two, and theres also a single USB 2 port for sharing data on a USB thumb drive. Neither Virgin nor Sky Q routers have this feature. If a strong Wi-Fi signal is important to you, you're already a BT customer, and you lack the funds for a full Sky Q setupor a Netgear Orbi, this router represents http://onlinegamesstuf.livejournal.com/2530.html a very tempting proposition. How to set up the BT Smart Hub to get the fastest performance As far as setup is concerned, it couldnt be easier. If you have ADSL, simply disconnect your old BT router from telephone socket, plug the new Smart Hub in and then switch it on. Those lucky enough to have fibre-to-the-home will need to plug their Ethernet cable into Ethernet port 1 instead. Theres no dedicated WAN port as there was with the Home Hub 5 a slightly baffling downgrade, but not one that will have a significant impact for most people. Once youve done this, simply pull out the plastic tab from the side of the router and log on to the new wireless network using the details printed on it. Configuring the router is straightforward, too. BT has spruced up the UI, making it easier than
before to understand all the various options and settings. However, I do wish that ISPs would stop merging SSIDs together. The last BT Home Hub did this and so does this one, and it means that youre never sure whether your devices are connecting to the (potentially faster) 5GHz network or the 2.4GHz. If you want to keep bandwidth-hungry connections such as video streaming on the fastest network and others on the slower one, youll have to carry out a little settings surgery and separate the two networks. This is easy enough to do: Type 192.168.1.254 into your web browser.Click the Wireless box in the centre of the page.Click the Change Settings box at the top of the screen.Enter the admin password its printed on the removable, pull-out tab on the right-hand side of the Smart Hub.On the next page look for the "Separate bands" switch at the top right. Click it, select Save and wait. You may need to log in to your Wi-Fi again after the change has taken effect. Use the Wireless key as printed on the plastic tab. Its also good to see that its relatively straightforward to set up and maintain access control on the router, something difficult to do on Skys system without networking know-how. You have to dig around for the setting its in the Advanced section but once youve found it, its easy to restrict internet access at particular times of the day for designated devices. http://www.alphr.com/bt/1003795/bt-smart-hub-review-the-best-isp-supplied-router-bar-none