BT scratches its head over MYSTERY Home Hub disconnections BT has been left puzzled after some Infinity customers complained about being abruptly disconnected from the fibre broadband network when using the telco's Home Hub 5 wireless router. The Register heard from one reader who told us that the mysterious disruptions to BT's Infinity service had apparently begun to surface after …
... BT Hub is very good indeed. Not only have I not experienced any problems with it (it's hanging off a non-describe white-box BT badged modem since the BT Hub can't handle Infinity2 natively, so I wouldn't know if it is the DSL modem part that is problematic), it is the only time to date that I have had a WiFi/DSL router that is fully configurable the way I want it without having to install OpenWRT onto it.
Are you thinking of the Hub4, with ADSL modem and CAT5 WAN inputs?
I'm positive the Hub5 has a native fibre modem in it, and I can't imagine it being limited to 40mb.
I still tell mates to insist they keep the BTOR Infinity Modem though, so if they get a problem, they can try it on the WAN input of the Hub5, or they can simply use a third party router with CAT5 WAN input to see them through (or get better functionality etc).
I run 80mb fibre through a Draytek 2830, that does me fine, even if I barely use 2% of it's functionality...
Steven R
Same here.
Never had a problem.
Hell, the same wireless router has followed me for nearly ten years now. I haven't had to change the config of a single PC even when I've moved house / moved ISP / moved from cabled to wireless to power-line. All my port-forwards still there and working, all the usual junk turned off.
Did the same at work. We were so annoyed by BT's business hubs that we bought our own ADSL modems and just did it the old fashioned way. Even load-balancing two connections was easier than peeing about with their kit. Eventually went leased-line with Virgin, though, as demand grew. But still (to my knowledge) have the same PC sitting behind that connection providing the REAL firewall / NAT / etc. setup.
We were so annoyed by BT's business hubs that we bought our own ADSL modems and just did it the old fashioned way
Yup - I tend to use Drayteks. Also allows two fallback circuits, one of which can be a simple USB 3G stick (not for large offices, of course, but it keeps a small office going while someone shouts at the provider), also at home.
I gave up on provider supplied routing, WiFi and firewalls many, many years ago and from what I hear there is really no reason at all to change that. Oh, and no FON stuff either, thanks.
Modem mode on the Virgin Media Super Hub 1 is all jolly fine if you're an ordinary consumer, but the business firmware is crippled and cannot be put into modem mode. So we have a TP Link wireless access point which gives a better signal through five brick walls than the Super Hub through two.
Maybe I'm unlucky but I've yet to find a home router that just works and keeps working.
The 'Super' hub was a joke. I did the same turned it into a modem, and added a TP-Link router that everyone seemed to think was the bee's knees. It needs restarting every couple of days, and for some reason Samsung devices regularly refuse to connect to it even though other devices are happily using it.
I've had numerous netgear devices and they've always been extremely painful. No one should be allowed to mention the word B3lk1n (I haven't bought one of these for at least 10 years but have continued to watch many others in pain).
I had a LinkSys WRT which started off fairly well but after a year started suffering disconnections and no amount of factory resets made any difference. I did look into put a different firmware on to that one but a certain amount of witch craft seemed to be involved and I never managed to get it to work following various tutorials.
I am curious ... why is it so difficult to make one of these things just work?!
Now a days I don't even do anything complex - I don't portforward or anything of that ilk, traffic going across the network is fairly minimal no torrenting etc...
"added a TP-Link router that everyone seemed to think was the bee's knees. It needs restarting every couple of days, and for some reason Samsung devices regularly refuse to connect to it even though other devices are happily using it."
I put DD-WRT on my two TP-Links (the official firmware is OpenWRT based anyway) and they've been rock-solid ever since. Maybe worth a shot?
> Maybe I'm unlucky but I've yet to find a home router that just works and keeps working.
Cue a million posts from people saying theirs is the best router ever...
I've got a Netgear DGND3700. It can do either ADSL or cable/fibre over Ethernet, it's never given me any trouble. Been bounced once in 6 months, and that was when the power went, and pulls 7.5 MB/sec off Usenet all night.
> No one should be allowed to mention the word B3lk1n
Yep, I had one of those too, mine was also a piece of crap...
> I am curious ... why is it so difficult to make one of these things just work?!
I don't think it is, but making one that works and is cheap enough that people will buy and/or ISPs give away perhaps is. A lot of people swear by Drayteks, but I can't justify spending £300 on a router - the Netgear cost me £50 second hand, and I thought that was a lot.
you joke, but back in 1984, I worked on a terminal emulator for a Spectrum, and borrowed an acoustic coupler to use in my digs with an old style payphone.
It worked too. I could log into the Uni PR1MEs at the breathtaking speed of 300 baud (look it up, youngsters). Although I was never sure why, since I couldn't actually do anything productive (I'm sure there's a point to make there somewhere).
Any followers I have (!) will now know why I mentioned the plethora of RS-232 connectors and cables ....
We had original Prestel terminals at college. They were just BBC Micro's in a box with different ROMs.
They weren't original Prestel terminals, then. Prestel predates the BBC micro...
We were playing with it in the '70s. The potential was immediately obvious - but the product was doomed to failure on account of BT's pricing.
France did viewdata rather better with its Minitel system - it was affordable for yer average types. It is rumoured that Minitel's success was one of the main reasons for slow Internet uptake in the country...
Vic.
Had the occasional problem on Infinity at my previous place, but nothing that a re-boot of the router didn't fix.
Not quite as impressive as the 4 week wait I've had to get my phone line restored after moving house - despite me getting them to do a line test done in advance, which they said indicated that it was all working.
Yet upon finding out it wasn't connected when I arrived, they now mysteriously can't find any record to say the line test was done or even requested. So one month later, we are now waiting for permission from the council to put in temporary traffic lights, so that they can dig a trench to re-connect my house. But they won't stop requesting payment for a service that they aren't providing - apparently I have to request a refund after the work is completed...
No-one else offers a phone line to my house so can't find an alternative provider. Suffice to say there will be no BT hardware anywhere near anything when I'm done.
EDIT: Sorry for the completely off at a tangent rant - just needed to vent...
Having worked for a subsidiary of BT, I have to say it is a wonder they are able to bill anyone correctly or deliver anything to the right place.
Our X.25 connection was disconnected because BT sent the bill to a hospital, who had nothing to do with the the X.25 connection. Unsurprisingly the hospital refused to pay. When we phoned BT to say our X.25 connection had died, the answer was "oh yes, we know about that, we didn't know who was using it so we turned it off to see who would complain. You'll have to pay the outstanding bill and a reconnection charge before we can switch it on again".
I recently switched from Sky to BT and whilst it's a definite improvement I've also had an unexpected disconnection. Rather than send me my first bill (or any warning that they were due a payment) BT very helpfully just cut off my broadband. Nice.
Also the "engineer" who installed it left with the broadband partially working and no phone. "Not my area of expertise. Maybe it'll work better tomorrow."
I'm not sure what the line test actually does.
We were having problems with our phone and tried the BT line test from there website(from work obviously) . It informed us there was nothing wrong and if we called out an engineer and no fault was found we would be charged a call out fee.
When the engineer arrived he quickly found the telephone line had become disconnected from the house, so lord knows what the test was testing
Basically it tests the exchange line card and line capacitance after a fashion. A dead short, or sometimes disconnected at the exchange, will show up. If they happen to test to a pair that ends in a cabinet, or a DP, it'll test normal (the wire-wire capacitance looks for all the world like a phone socket with nothing plugged in).
No way can they tell that the line is in fact terminated in a working socket in YOUR house. I just wish they'd tell the people doing these tests from India that!
Thank for explaining that @Martin-73.
Of course the more obvious question is why the graphic on their website clearly indicates it is testing the the entire line and not the line only to the exchange. This is further exacerbated by the accompanied dire warnings of death, pestilence and the sale of your 1st born into slavery if you dare to call out one of their engineers.
Still good to know for next time...
>occasional problem on Infinity at my previous place, but nothing that a re-boot of the router didn't fix.
You haven't "fixed" the problem by rebooting, all you have done is re-establish the connection. Whether it is a memory leak, poor implementation of the protocol or some other issue that is causing your occasional problems you still have it and the reboot has not fixed it.
Why does this sound so depressingly familiar!
Last house was so called connected when moved in but took a month to locate the three separate faults on the line before it worked and each time they fixed a single fault they said it's now fixed without any checking or phoning to verify. Eventually got a magnificent 1.5 Mbps connection in an area rated as 12Mbps on average.
Recently had a 20 day period of worsening line speed until nothing not even a phone connection with all kinds of crap "fixes" such as not meant to turn the router off over night. Eventually traced to a disconnected wire in the street cabinet which had magically managed to disconnect itself! Obviously Open Breach had nothing to do with it!
Although the last time I looked, AAISP were sending out the godawful TG-582N as their home router. Whilst they had nobly hacked the one sub-version of the firmware where the developers had forgotten to remove IPv6, getting it to remember a firewall rule appears to be a genuinely impossible task.
"Yes actually, I don't expect it to try catching fire! Yet, amazingly, the engineer that came to install my internet connection told me that that's what happened in one house where their Infinity modem was on the floor and it got covered over by something!"
Sounds highly unlikely. These things are all 9V DC - there isn't enough wattage to set anything alight. At most you might get a bit of smoke from a blown electrolytic.
He could have been talking about the power brick but even then it seems unlikely. Probably some kid did something stupid with some matches and the family decided to say it happened "spontaniously" so they wouldn't have to pay for a new one.
Callam that's a bit unfair - very little electrical equipment can be left switched on & completely covered up, they need to be able to cool somehow. Throw something like a winter coat over any router so heat can't escape and it will get hot enough so it either stops completely, or actually catches fire.
Once the Virginmedia hardware is in passthrough mode there is no problem. The router is as good as off. I've had one running for over a year now without a hiccup. I have my own router sitting behind the modem. Rock solid.
Have also been running some industry test kit here which sends me montly reports that keep telling me that my average downstream throughput is generally around 60-62Mbps.
I've not tried modem mode, but I have had to set a friend's network so that it all works with the superhub in factory configuration. I set it up with a different IP range, guest wireless, all the goodies - and it stopped working a few weeks later, when it had a firmware upgrade. The upgrade process seems to factory reset the router, and they don't restore your config. When this happened again I had to admit defeat and reconfigure everything else around the factory settings. No guest wireless, which was a pity as he's a consultant who had the occasional customer visit.
If you're in modem mode, does that get preserved across firmware upgrades?
No
After a firmware update or if they just decide to reset it for you; it wakes up in factory reset mode
Why on earth they can not do basic easy stuff is beyond me - if you Virgin (and BT are worse) decide to reset my router; why can't I bill you for setting it up properly again ?
My parents just had Infinity installed and I had a play with the router.
It looks perfectly capable and can do all the usual stuff you'd expect. It's dual band 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, gigabit ethernet, you can attach a HDD to it as a basis NAS and all the usual configuration stuff seems to be there (static IPs, firewall settings, etc).
So what features exactly are worth dumping, what seems to be a reasonable bit of technology, and ponying up 150 quid for a new router?
I suppose QoS might be nice, but unless you live in a house with 5 other students all gaming and using bittorrent, I'm not sure it's worth the extra 150 notes nice...
> Would it do any good to be able to define alternate DNS servers; doesn't BT route all DNS requests to their own Mumsnet approved servers anyway?
You might be running your own DNS server on the LAN, no reason it couldn't use a VPN tunnel to go out and grab it's DNS from elsewhere (exactly what I do).
If the Content Filters are enabled, then you get a lovely blue screen whenever you try and access any page - if you're using Off-Network (i.e. non BT) DNS servers (see this screenshot. Though in true BT style even that's only half implemented - if you use TCP instead of UDP for your DNS queries it all gets through fine (or did when I was testing).
If the filters are 'Deleted' - i.e. NOT just Off - then they don't tinker with your DNS (as far as I can tell) though I trust BT about as far as I can throw them, so I've tunnelled mine anyway.
Ok so your parents aren't likely to need to do this, but you did ask what it was missing
Try adding/configuring
- Static routes (useful if you're running a VPN server)
- Custom DNS address via DHCP (as mentioned above)
It's also a bit stingy, in that it has NTP but won't seem to share the love with the LAN.
It lacks Wake on Lan and various other (small but useful) bits. For quite a while (couldn't tell you if it's been fixed without checking).
Yes, QoS could be handy too.
Are these features worth an extra £100? Probably not, though as they're all quite small and the HH has an 'Advanced' section, you could also ask whether they could just have included them instead.
I agree on putting down extra cash though, so mines becom(ing) nothing more than an Internet Gateway, with a Pi taking over most of its duties.
The biggest issue I found with the HH though was that the Wifi was useless. At semi-regular intervals it just seemed to decide to discard all packets until you re-associated (tested on multiple devices). BTs response was that it must be something in my house causing interference, though strangely enough the AP on the Pi hasn't been exhibiting the same behaviour.
I have the new home hub 5, and it has been working perfectly, excellent coverage and speed. However, I moved it next to the radiator and boom rebooted 3-4 times in one day! Phoned BT, did a reset etc, still did it, moved it away from the radiator and it has been fine ever since. Anyone found this with theirs?
I suspect your mother never uses the internet then, we replaced it within 2 weeks due to awful performance, awful features, awful specs, crashed several times a day under moderate traffic gradually getting wrose, took 10 minutes to connect to infinity after regular disconnects.
The BT Modem on the other hand is rock solid (which is connected to a Vigor 2830N I think and well worth the money)
I read an interview with an exec going on about how great it was that they found a £40 router with IPv6, which in 2013 is really not very impressive when coupled with a bizarre interface, a 100Mbps network and wireless G only, along with numerous other obscure or missing features, so I have no idea who chose the router or why, but I expect BT Home hubs are a bucket load better.
One of my business clients got plusnet fibre in, and they used a different subnet for the LAN by default - which broke printing etc, obviously. They aren't a maintenance client, so I don't maintain their network, so I wasn't informed of the change etc.
ever tried changing the subnet on these things? You need to go into the CLI of the router to drop the DHCP server and reinstate or some other buggering about that I had to learn on site.
Drayteks (which we strongly suggest any client we take on switches to) is a change in a dialogue box and a 15 sec reboot cycle - much nicer. Hell, even the BT hubs can do that - as can every other modem I've used.
Having CLI access is nice, but for a simple subnet change, it really shouldn't require that much knowledge IMHO.
Bonkers stuff, but then, other than that, it's worked OK I suppose....
I'd still rather they had a Draytek (like the poster above, I've found 2830+BTOR modem = win, although I'm finding the 2860s to be pretty tasty too - better WAN/VPN throughput etc, although bring your own AP if you want fast wireless!) but you can't force it on 'em!
Anon. Well, just because :)
I recently came across an article on the Andrews and Arnold site which looks like it relates to a similar problem with FTTC modems.
BT __are__ aware of that issue as they have been working with A&A to understand and resolve the problem for some months now.
See
http://status.aa.net.uk/1854 and http://revk.www.me.uk/2013/11/bt-huawei-working-with-us.html
The wifi on this router is prodigious - I get 24megabytes / second (yes MEGABYTES) across 3 floors over 5GHz, from my 2012 macbook pro.
However I did suffer some phantom reboots (3 to be precise) with what looked like BT downloading a test version of firmware to the router about an hour before the problems start. So I think someone is telling porkies and knows exactly what is going on... I'm now just using it as an access point which means BT can't update it (the requests for updates fail according to the log).
This is one of the phantom reboots:
14:04:08, 23 Jan. ( 15.410000) Booting firmware 4.7.5.1.83.8.173.1.6 (Type A)
14:03:26, 23 Jan. ( 3627.460000) PPP LCP Send Termination Request [User request]
14:03:25, 23 Jan. ( 3625.820000) The system is going DOWN for reboot.
14:03:25, 23 Jan. ( 3625.820000) OpenRG is going for reboot by IPC command
14:03:20, 23 Jan. ( 3620.820000) OpenRG will go down for reboot in 5 seconds
And here is the log of the download test version:
11:47:22, 23 Jan. (1036840.080000) CWMP: Download file, FileType=4, FileName=5a-1.7-testpackage-package.tar.gz.aes.rsa.signed, Username=, CommandKey=1329156652
Every BT home hub is crap. Every last one. It's only because the ASA is populated by spineless, technologically unaware idiots, that BT can get away with their stupid adverts ('our best ever wifi signal compared to all other broadband providers' - what the hell does that even mean?)
Well let me solve the mystery of random hub disconnections. It's explained by:
- crap hardware made as cheaply as possible.
- shitty coding by offshore developers.
There. Easy.
"from the one-time national telco." I assumed to mean nationalised? As far as I am aware BT still covers most of the nation and is thus national, that is accept the Hull area, which is still a KC monopoly and has been since before BT. Fortunately KC Lightstream is being put in our village at the moment so we may well have fibre in the next month. We still won't be able to access lots of services that BT/Sky/Virgin offer and we'll still have no choice of provider other than 3/4g or in some cases local wireless services.
This is the best router I've ever had, and I've been through quite a few. The wireless performance has been rock solid, and I've not had to reset it since I installed it a couple of months ago. I also have tested the BT 802.11ac dongle, and throughput is astonishing.
I think that this has got to be the best router from any ISP at the moment. It doesn't hurt that I got it for next to nothing as a staff upgrade to the HH4 (which wasn't a great success for me - lots of random wireless disassociations).
The only thing I don't like is the limited configuration options for the DHCP server, but it delivers great wireless throughput and stability, 4 GigE ports, 802.11ac, USB host and better VDSL than the open reach modem in a single box.
That isn't to say that it might not be borked by firmware 'improvements' later, but for now I'm a very happy camper.
Almost every night between 2-3am (if I am up, which is quite often) I lose internet access for a few minutes. It normally comes back up right away, occasionally a reboot of the router is required.
Sky are of no help at all, they replaced the router about 6 months ago but the same thing happens.
It's no big deal, unless you happen to be in the middle of a live stream of the Nye vs Ham debate like I was a few hrs ago or if you're in a video hangout with friends in the US as I often am.... But the frequency of it does get annoying.
Their WIFI on the new HH5 is crippled.
Every now and then the ping for WIFI goes up through .5 second, this causes problems with a lot of the internet as you can imagine.
It'll sit there for about 5 mins or so, then the ping will drop to 0.1ms, and life is again good.
The WIFI in the netgear router in my shed (acting as an AP) never misses a beat.
On the plus side it does mean I have a greater excuse for being in the shed, rather than watching "Celebrity death dance dive on ice" show.
I'm solidly in the "BT Router is crap camp". I'm not 100% sure if its the same as the article but mine is a separate router to the modem. It needed a reboot every day / every other day at time.
After a week I lost my patience and I resurrected an old PC and put pfSense on it and been using that as a router since without fuss. It has way more features (especially useful for granularly limiting different devices internet access by date/time). Obviously its a geeky solution , uses more space and power and relies on the fact I have a separate bunch of WiFi devices.
I had a BT Infinity circuit put in at work. It had the same router. It totally refused to DMZ or route the VPN traffic to a particular machine (DMZ may have worked for other things but not VPN). Ended up putting pfSense on a virtual machine and ditching the modem. Everything been fine since. Unlike home, because I got no extra hardware, its an elegant setup.
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