I didn’t pay anything for it, I got it as part of my current Broadband Package. Basically one day a sales person from BT phoned up and said; “If you agree to sign up for another year to your broadband package, we will reduce the cost by £2 a month and thrown in this BT Vision thingy for you…”

No brainer really… apart from the fact that apparently I can’t recieve freeview and I need the BT Home Hub which I don’t use. Anyway, I decided to set it up anyway… plugged it into my router instead of the Home Hub, plugged it into the aerial… and off we go… all the Freeview channels with interactivity and recording and playback and…

The kids are happy because they now have proper access to CBeebies and CBBC!

So I finally moved closer to the world of Digital… but I kept my side of the bargain… I didn’t pay anything for it… didn’t even have to change the aerial as I expected to! I told you that they would need to make me move over!

Got home last night and opened the Home Hub box… well it’s cheap, but kind of classy! I thought about it for a while before finally cracking and deciding to install it. My reason for the U-Turn was that I figured that installing the BT supplied router might kickstart the incrementing of my IP profile.      

I plugged all the wires in and left it for the prerequisited 1hr… I didn’t think I actually needed this as the internet light had done it’s blinking and gone stable after about 2 mins… well I guess it would as my previous router had already been talking on the new adsl line for a few days. But leave it I did, don’t want anyone pointing at a failure and saying it was because I hadn’t followed the letter of the law.

A hour later I stuck the CD into my machine and waited for the install to kick in… it didn’t… my machine couldn’t read the disc, so I put the disc in another machine and it fired up ok. The install process proceeded; it decided that I could connect through the wireless or wired. I chose wireless as wired is actually impractical; my study is not the place where the ADSL master socket is, and therefore where the Hub is situated, I only have wireless connection and no Cat-5 ethernet socket, and there is no USB cable in the world that stretches the distance required…
The install found my Hub and I put the wep key in… didn’t work, it couldn’t connect. Retried it a number of times with no success.

So, I clicked on my Wireless Network connection and set it up manually on both machines… both machines could see each other but not the internet. So the wireless was working but something on the hub wasn’t setup correctly; I figured I needed to complete the installation somehow.

I shared the CD drive on the machine that could read the disc and started the install over the network on the other machine… same result!

There was no other choice but to somehow connect in a wired setup! Luckily I found I had an old phone extension, not one that you would want to run your adsl router on all the time, but one that would at least allow me to get the Hub and computer in the same room without luggin all the computer equipment out of the study.

Connected machine and Hub with the USB cable and started the install again… everything went through ok. Once the install had finished I could connect to the internet AND the wireless connection worked fine.

There was one problem… the install program had littered my machine with YAHOO crap! It had replaced my IE7 browser with its own that required login and stuff. I managed to uninstall that and get IE7 back, but it then had toolbars and sidebars and leftbars and downbars… I think I got rid of all that by disabling and uninstalling… however on reboot the BT Helpdesk desktop no longer worked correctly, missing function in some DLL… so I had to uninstall that as well!

My machine was now connecting correctly and nicely sans YAHOO.

The Home Hub comes with a unique factory preset SSID name and Wep key, it also comes with BROADCAST name on by default. I know this because I can see all the SSID’s of houses around me! So I fired up the Hub Manager but was unable to get into the advanced settings… it seems the Hub Manager doesn’t work with IE7! Connected to the Hub through Firefox and turned off the Broadcast feature, noticed that I could change the name and Wep key also; tweaked some other settings, setup the Application routing for FTP, Remote Desktop, and my SVN Server… to be honest, that all went pretty smooth and neatly.

No option for updating DynDns though… I know the router can do it, as the options are there when you telnet to the hub, but that method is way too complicated and I didn’t understand how to do it… I only knew about the telnet option because I read it here…

Anyway, flicked over to a href=”http://www.dyndns.org/”>DynDns and found that there is an update client that will do exactly what I wanted. Which by the way is to inform DynDns of my IP address every time it changes…

So, so far so good… the speed issue isn’t resolved, still capped at 2mb, but I can wait…

In Summary…
Install with a Wireless setup doesn’t work very well.
Installing all the YAHOO stuff sucks!
No obvious DynDns support.
Easy to use Hub Manager.
No IE7 Support on Hub Manager.

I spent a little time on the phone to an Indian call centre last night… BT’s official speed test site shows that my line is indeed 7.5mb but that my IP profile is currently 2mb… I fugure the IP profile is too low and needs upping… anyhow the guy from the call centre explained that it takes 10 days for the line to settle and for your profile to get set correctly. Personally I’m a little suspect and expect to go back to them in 10 days saying that the speed is no better.

A little searching online suggests that the 10 day thing is probably correct! However, general opinion seems to be against the Home Hub. I did pick it up this morning from the Post Office, however, I’m not so sure that I will install it. I think I’ll stick with my netgear or get a newer version of the netgear etc…

My Netgear DG834G is showing connection speed of 7.5mb and upload of 448kb… however all speed checks are showing <2mb. I live pretty close to the Exchange so I should get good response.

So I’m not sure if there is a bedding in time issue or if my router is not up to the job… I guess I’ll find out tomorrow when I can pick up the Home Hub!