What do you want to see in the next Home Hub?

Recently I came across something on the internet regarding a new hub trial on the BT Trial Centre. I was too late to sign up, but it got me thinking on what BT could do for the next one. I couldn't find a post like this, so I'd thought I'd make one so I could hear other peoples thoughts and wishes for the next Home Hub. I'll start!

Gigabit Ethernet Ports
I can only assume that BT designed the Hub with one GigE due to cost. If they were all Gigabit then perhaps it would save some people from having to buy switches instead. The limitations of the current Hub wouldn't be felt so much on FTTC, but I can imagine on FTTP it might get rather annoying!

Combined Modem/Router
The announcement that CP's could use their own modem gives me faith that maybe we could see a combo box that does both jobs in one. Remove the need for two plug sockets and would look better. I'd imagine that this would be implemented in such a way that it could also be used in modem mode only like the Virgin Superhub, for those who want to bring their own routers. Not sure how this would work for FTTP, as the ONT seems rather more complex. Maybe BT could just offer a combi hub for FTTC customers, or allow it to be used with the VDSL component dormant when used on ADSL.

Wall Mountable
If it were to be a combined box, then why not wall mount it? OR current mounts the modem by default, so if BT were to make a new Hub why not use the exact same fitting to allow users to simply swap and replace? Less Hassle for the consumer.

AC Wireless
Wishful thinking I know but wouldn't it be great if it supported this? Especially useful for FTTP as I think 'N' maxes out at 300mbs and that's the theoretical limit with actual speeds, from what I can see, less than half of this. Would be great for FTTP and for future proofing! The lack of consumer routers support this though lead me to believe it will be a long time before we see any kind of support for it in bundled routers.

Feel free to add your own suggestions, I'd love to know what sort of things other people might want!

The Virgin Superhub is, as you say, a combined modem and router. But it had problems right from the start concerning wireless range and strength. The upgrade to permit modem only mode was an improvement but did not solve all the issues. The 5MHz option works very well, although range is not so good.
At least with the current BT setup wireless is reasonable - combined modem/router setups don't seem to work so well, probably because the ISPs go for the cheaper models to keep the price down.

People expect their hub to be provided "Free" and because of that BT will only make required and basic functionality available and for a majority of customers that is all that is required.

Most of the users they ask about what is needed will be advanced users who will want Gbit on every port, 2.4 and 5 Ghz wireless, wireless repeaters, 2 USB ports for NAS drives, VOIP connectivity, &c A totally biassed sample. The number of locations I see where nothing more than the basics are in use is probably 10 times the number where even one non-basic function is in use.

the cost of gige vs 100mbit ports especially when there is a gigabi capable processor (as is the case with hh3) will be very small, I am baffled the hh3 had a gigabit port mixed with 100mbit ports as the cost savings would have been tiny. If its not corrected in the hh4 (assuming is a hh4) I will be gobsmacked.

I assume you mean vdsl modem? as the hh3 can already act as a adsl modem? maybe it would be welcome because the current modem situation isnt great, the ECI looks like a half done job, the hg has issues on ECI dslams, and a friztbox costs over £200.

dont care for wallmount.

I think the gui needs to be less dumbed down, at least have the ability to allow pings.

It's easy, I would like to see a Fritz!box 7390 re branded as HH4 with AC wireless. Job Done. (Although BT might baulk at the price!)

Latest rumors suggest that the next hub will have 5ghz wifi unfortunately, and a built in vdsl modem.

I built in coffee machine.

I want it to connect wirelessly at full Infinity speed even to my old 801.11g notebooks in the opposite corner of the house or in the garden. I like making my own coffee, though, so leave out that bit.

More seriously, I am afraid any new HomeHub is unlikely to all that brilliant; people who want advanced functions will almost certainly still need to buy their own. Meanwhile, I still find the old HomeHub (just) adequate.

Main feature I would like is the ability to set my own DNS at the router ~ but the old one could clearly do that if BT chose to allow it in the firmware.
All gigabit ports would make sense ~ because of the layout of our house I would still use a switch anyway so it wouldn't actually help us.
And support for the latest wireless standards.

Edited by StephenTodd (Tue 02-Apr-13 09:33:59)

The Fritz! box although expensive, as is the Draytek, is well worth the money if you are on a Huawei dslam, for some reason there have been reports of problems with the Fritz! on the ECI dslams.

It also has a power function for the ports so that you can change them from 100mbit to 1gbit, thereby saving energy if some of your peripherals only use 100mbit

This is the sort of kit that BT should be making for Power Users, they could still keep the old HH3 for the normal users, and maybe charge the difference for those who want something better.

Wallmount is useful, and it is only 2 holes in the base after all.

PS forgot to mention it also has simultaneous 2.4 & 5 Ghz WiFi unlike the Draytek

Edited by The_Voyager (Tue 02-Apr-13 13:39:43)

I'd certainly be willing to pay more if it meant I could get a greater degree of control. I would have considered a Fritz! but my cabinet, based on its exterior, is ECI and your comments made me a little more cautious. Also I find it to look hideous. I know its not exactly going to be a work of art or the centre piece of a room but still at least make it look decent. Why on earth they painted it red and added those fins on I'll never know!

But you'd have no control over the flavour! ;D

Don't know what you mean, I quite like the look of it, makes it stand out from the crowd

The fins hide the wireless antenna

That is their "corporate design" ... even my old ISDN interface looked very similar to that.

I have actually just ordered a 3370.

Seems an affordable version of the friztbox, I am hoping none of the advanced dsl features have been cut, but from what I can read and see its just a 7390 without the phone functions and cannot use dual band wireless at same time.

ECI seems problems full stop I think, my guess is the ECI are cheaper for BT than HG, and I have read reports most new rollout areas are ECI as a result.

I am on a ECI dslam, but the hg modem is problematic on that as well. I think only ECI to ECI combo works reasonably well but the ECI modems are quite bad in terms of accessing information.

Ok after reading your posts I just checked some german discussions.

It seems the 3370 uses a different DSL chipset to the 7390 the 3370 uses wait for it a Infineon / Lantiq chipset the same as in ECI dslams. So in theory it will work better on ECI than the 7390 does.

I am worried the snr tuning is going to be missing on the 3370 as its a different dsl chipset meaning thats now more likely, I planned to bump up my snrm to speed up the dlm process of reverting to fast path.

Edited by Chrysalis (Tue 02-Apr-13 19:48:02)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

ECI seems problems full stop I think, my guess is the ECI are cheaper for BT than HG, and I have read reports most new rollout areas are ECI as a result.

It's because they won the contract

In reference to uk.reuters.com/article/2010/07/06/ecitelecom-bt-idUKLDE6650A720100706:

(Reuters) - ECI Telecom has won its largest ever contract, an $800 million deal with British telecom BT's (BT.L) Openreach to help bring a large-scale super-fast broadband network to Britain.

One thing to point out when you set it up, there is an Eco function on the LAN ports, only LAN 1 will be Gbit to start with if you want any of the others to be more than 10/100 then you have to set them up on the interface, let us know how you get on with it.

PS Why the frown, they are pretty good rates, I'm only 3 miles from the centre of London, and my actual attainable is only 7 Mbits/s more than you and max attainable is less

Edited by The_Voyager (Wed 03-Apr-13 10:59:52)

at half the price looks good, and as not much stuff uses 5Ghz, simultaneous dual band is not really a great loss, if it works better with ECI then your on to a winner. I changed my kit over after the first few weeks (April 2012) and have never looked back.

because of what my line was capable of on day 1 the frown.

Check my new sig for the latest update, its a constant decline in progress.

The fritzbox is due to arrive tommorow.

In reply to a post by The_Voyager:

at half the price looks good, and as not much stuff uses 5Ghz, simultaneous dual band is not really a great loss, if it works better with ECI then your on to a winner. I changed my kit over after the first few weeks (April 2012) and have never looked back.

yeah the sim wireless I admit is a bit of a dissapointment not because I need it but rather its future proofing, however the 7390 is a heft price tag and as it stands this is experimental. Plus AVM are releasing new models later this year as well.

Apparently fritzos is pretty kickass and uniform across all their devices so am looking forward to trying this out.

The 7390 able to use mobile phones on a landline was also potentially useful for me (as my cordless landline phone battery life is extremely dire compared to mobile phone) but again as I dont use the landline much and the premium of the 7390 I held off that model.

The friztbox 7360 is also another interesting model. At half the price of the 7390, I assume it shares the same dsl chip as the 7390, but it only has 2 gigabit lan ports, and no 5ghz wireless at all. However keeps analogue phone functions.

Whats interesting is seeing other isp's overseas are using quality routers as CPE's including some using fritz 7390 devices, the CPE's BT chose just look cheap compared to what other telcos have picked.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 03-Apr-13 15:25:20)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

because of what my line was capable of on day 1 the frown.
Check my new sig for the latest update, its a constant decline in progress.

Could be cross talk as more and more people get VDSL. One reason why many believe FTTC/VDSL to be only an interim measure at best.

I don't think I would go with the 7360, I'd rather pay more for the 7390 and get the full works, future proofing was one of the reasons I went that way, when I bought mine it was only £186 and I opted for the Fon as well for a further £50, they really work together well, and paying the extra £5 odd a month for free calls is worth every penny, anything outside of that I use 18866

I do agree, another reason I held off is that later this year a new friztbox is to be released. If I did need the phone functions I would have gone 7390.

So I see the 3370 as a trial of their product. If I really like then I may upgrade to a higher model but after the newer model comes out. More info on this is on the german wiki page, I think the english page isnt so up to date.

But for me the most likely feature on the higher modem I ould only use is the dual band wireless and I dont have any 5ghz devices either currently, so the 3370 is adequate enough assuming no software features are cut.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 03-Apr-13 21:45:38)

I got the frixtzbox now but is a bit of a wow in terms of dissapointment after all its hype.

Its not been tried on my line yet as a modem I have just been looking round the gui, preconfiguring ppp etc. But it seems a very dumbed down interface (I am in expert mode). eg. no firewall configuration, cannot allow pings so can monitor line externally with tbb, cannot disable nat or enable bridge mode (yet in screenshots I seen that function is there), things like tuning connection, syn, udp timeouts are not tunable. Cant tune ppp timeout (useful for keeping ip on dsl outages, or short ppp outages).

If it had a bridge mode the rest wouldnt matter as would just hook up to existing router. But in all the configurability seems not much more than what a homehub can configure. Will test the dsl modem on it today to see how well it syncs.

On the 7390 Firmware 05.22

Bridge mode is accessed in Internet | Account Information | Connection, radio button External modem or Router

Line settings are found under Internet | DSL Information | Line Settings for SNR, INP & RFI

I think they have kept the setting simple so that users can't mess things up, I find it just works, without all the messing about that you have to do with other Router/Modems

Make sure you have the latest firmware for it.

If you really want something that is much more configurable I would look at the Drayteks or get one of the Router only versions of Netgear etc.

that option is for if another router is holding the the internet connection.

on older firmwares there was an extra setting under "operational mode" which allowed bridge mode.

As far as I know there is only one firmware for this model, as it already comes with 5.22 (newer model).

Germany has 5.50 which should be coming soon to uk models (already available for 7360).

The core functionality is good enough (havent tested wireless yet tho) so if its stable I will use it but was just dissapointed with lack of advanced options it feels dumbed down like a CPE device, in some cases worse cant even set mtu/mss values, can you confirm if you can monitor with tbb on your fritzbox?

What I havent figured out yet if possible is if I can get the dsl data graphed, since the router has no snmp. Will search german forums to see if anyone made any apps to do that.

Ok did some more reading, downloaded a tool called FBeditor and is a lot of stuff that can be configured outside of the gui so that helps (such as mtu and bridge mode). Although I wont be changing anything like that yet, I will just run it in its default state with lan ports changed to gigabit and pppoe configured.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 04-Apr-13 18:22:35)

Okay, don't know anything about bridge mode, never used it

tbb monitor states unable to use with dynamic address, but I have set it up anyway to see if it works, wireless here slightly better than with HomeHub, but not as good as when I had Be with Netgear DG834GT, I live in a small block of 1950s maisonettes.

I use SamKnows Router for monitoring and a desktop app:Networkx to keep an eye on actual DL/UL speeds.

See if SamKnows are still recruiting testers, you get a monthly email of your Throughput, latency, and packet loss, you can also log into the web and check anytime

and while I've been typing this I can confirm that tbb is monitoring my connection, but if my address changes then of course I would have to set it up again

thats good enough thanks for testing.

I am already a samkows member, what I will be monitoring is my snr, attainable etc. if i find an app I will let everyone know here, but my german is a bit rusty, but already found 3-4 other apps people developed for fritzbox,, seems really popular in germany.

ich spreche Urlaub deutsche, I can ask directions, order things, problem comes when they reply, it has to be simple answers, I was a post war baby, so actually born there. Would be very grateful if you manage to find something really useful, I used to use the DMT Tool from Kitz

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

I got the frixtzbox now but is a bit of a wow in terms of dissapointment after all its hype.

Thanks for the info - I was looking at something newer than my old Draytek 2820 and I ordered the ASUS RT-N66U last night, after looking for about an hour at the Fritz website. The Fritz stuff doesn't have WiFi certification which put me off having had lots of issues with older routers that weren't WiFi certified.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

I am worried the snr tuning is going to be missing on the 3370 as its a different dsl chipset meaning thats now more likely, I planned to bump up my snrm to speed up the dlm process of reverting to fast path.

Noise margin tweaking on the HG612 is ignored by the DLM on the Huawei DSLAM I'm connected to, which carries on in it's own sweet way.

Openreach specifically state it isn't allowed. I conclude they have ensured that in the DLM software or the DSLAM firmware.

I hope everyone forking out on one of these other pieces of kit is checking it is compliant with the recent Openreach specification for non-Openreach modems and VDSL2 routers. Particularly wrt vectoring.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

I hope everyone forking out on one of these other pieces of kit is checking it is compliant with the recent Openreach specification for non-Openreach modems and VDSL2 routers. Particularly wrt vectoring.

Precisely why I intend to leave the Openreach modem in place!

the hg612 doesnt have vdsl snr tuning, its adsl only.

Its been confirmed elsewhere the fritz (at least the 7390) can adjust snr margins on FTTC although I havent touched that and have left it on default. Although the GUI only lets you adjust it upwards for stability.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

I hope everyone forking out on one of these other pieces of kit is checking it is compliant with the recent Openreach specification for non-Openreach modems and VDSL2 routers. Particularly wrt vectoring.

It may not be, and it may be the case openreach can disconnect people with incompatible kit, however with that said with the soon to be introduction of self installs with 3rd party kit, that policy wont really mean so much.

Of course openreach dont seem in any rush to rollout vectoring, so right now its a mute point although in future it could be.

I have been seeing some issues with matching chipsets on interleaving.

When I was on fast path the ECI synced approx 1mbit lower than the HG. Bear in mind I am on a ECI dslam.

After interleaved the ECI syncs much lower than the HG and I only just noticed today that the difference is equal to the size of FEC buffering, and looks like for some reason on Infineon chipsets FEC is been applied twice somehow, or for whatever reason they just really bad at sync speeds when interleaving is enabled.

The HG however has been giving me lots of stability issues since the past 4-6 weeks. This is a reason I have popped in a new modem to test for a day or so, I do have an engineer turning up this afternoon to investigate my large drop in profile and why I have been getting many outages (some lasting hours).

Some of the dsl stats on the fritz modem are more detailed in that it shows the DLM banding profile, I can see I have also been banded to min 37 max 74, it seems DLM has simply gone nuts, and you may guess I am not a fan of the FTTC DLM. However in other ways the stats are less detailed, I see no sync uptime information, and I cant see total error counts since start of sync, only errors in last 15 minutes and average error rate per minute.

The upstream which is still on fast path (so at least this DLM doesnt apply it both ways) has a sync speed and snrm comparable to the HG, although the reported average error rate is just under 1 CRC error per minute which would work out at about 1440 a day if exactly 1 per minute, the HG has a upstream error rate of about 500-600 per day but on the HG I noticed a lot of the errors came in a short space of time (during outage periods) and then had a very low error rate at other times. The downstream error rate on this device is the opposite tho, it seems lower than the HG. The HG averaged about 2000 FEC a day in the last few days I used it earlier this week (but on a higher sync) whilst this has been averaging 0.4 a minute so approx 700 or so.a day. No CRC errors yet on downstream.

What I find such a shock at the moment is the huge gulf in sync speeds between diff chipsets on interleaving and the loser is the chipset matching the dslam.

On the router side of things, I had noticed since I was interleaved and especially during the past week alot of browsing activity had got very laggy. Things are somewhat more snappy again after plugging in the fritzbox. In particular streaming sites are back to normal. Although not as snappy as when I was on fast path.

Contrary what others have reported on the annex settings, I had to use AnnexA, AnnexB wouldnt sync at all.

Edited by Chrysalis (Fri 05-Apr-13 07:18:47)

If you are interested I have posted screen shots of my DSL pages on

http://rwaller.livedrive.com/item/67de12c743b34ff284...

you can download them to see full size, only small pngs

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

I am worried the snr tuning is going to be missing on the 3370 as its a different dsl chipset meaning thats now more likely, I planned to bump up my snrm to speed up the dlm process of reverting to fast path.

Noise margin tweaking on the HG612 is ignored by the DLM on the Huawei DSLAM I'm connected to, which carries on in it's own sweet way.

Openreach specifically state it isn't allowed. I conclude they have ensured that in the DLM software or the DSLAM firmware.

Tweaking of noise margins by users will ultimately affect operation of Vectoring. If it is ever installed and operational, by increasing the (desired) SNR the user is saying use less tones or less bits/tone. The predictive side of vectoring would then need to continually monitor that aspect as well (on all other lines in the cabinet) before injecting the noise cancelling signal - a massive increase in processing requirements.

yes I have those same screens, although when I said graphs I meant historical graphs of days/weeks/months that are kept even when router is off/rebooted, so I have records of my line history.

I only posted those so you could see what I was getting and so you could see if there were any differences in the 7330, I agree with you about being able to trace them for longer periods and being able to save them, DMT tool was good for that, shame they can't get it running for the Fritz!, the problem is there is no way to telnet into it

The problem with DMT though is/was that it packs in at a disconnection. That's why I ditched it for RouterStatsLite.

Yeah, that was better than DMT, but my memory couldn't remember it, you just jogged it, I used to use the normal version, not the lite.

I tried tbb on the fritz and it is blocking my pings like I read, it seems it applies a rate limit.

Fritz

telnet can be opened on the 7390 trivially using a phone.

Its harder on the 3370 tho as no phone connection, on the german forums they used a trick via the firmware upgrade feature, but I am not prepared to try it yet.

Of course it can be done via the gui as well eg. the hg612 app, originally used the gui to fetch stats.

ok thanks.

The difference I can see is actually just one extra option on the 3370 for also tuning upstream snrm. The rest of the info pages look the same, except when compared to the older firmware on the 7390.