BT Home Hub 6 - Feedback

Now that BT Home Hub 6 has been out for a few weeks so far - anyone have it yet?

Thoughts? Good/better than HH5? Any issue/gotchas that we should be aware of?

And lastly... worth the upgrade?

Several threads in various forums and very few not disapproving. IIRC mainly even worse wireless than the previous versions.

A few people especially on this forum have complained. Over on the BT forum it is more positive.

A fair few of us on another forum had many issues with the HH5s. All of us have now got HH6s and have confirmed all of those issues have gone away. A couple of guys here also confirmed the same issue, and that the hh6 fixed it.

The most common issues with HH5 were:
1) Type B - when splitting 5ghz and 2.4Ghz bands, the 5Ghz band would get stuck at around 10Mbps over wireless
2) Type A - throughput would randomly get stuck around 30Mbps when splitting the 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz bands on 5Ghz
3) With 15+ devices connected both models would reboot themselves

PROs for me
Much stronger 5Ghz wireless signal (great as that is really all I use)
Never reboots or crashes (apart from scheduled 14 day reboot) with a total of 40 wireless devices in my home now (I know jesus christ right)... We average around 15 devices connected at any one time.

Negatives
Some users report it syncs slower than HH5. Mine seems the same though.
2.4Ghz signal seems slightly worse than the HH5A but is a lot better than the HH5B.

I got mine at the start of May and have not unplugged it even once.
Out of the box I split the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands, disabled smart setup, disabled automatic wireless channel selection (have fixed channel 1 and 36).

For me it has been the very best router I have ever owned. It is honestly flawless in my home.
Range is fantastic, goes through 4 solid walls and still gets me 25Mbps over wireless with a -85 RSSI. I have nothing connected over ethernet so cannot comment on that.

I am convinced those with issues have a faulty device, it is possible there is a bad batch floating around or something. Certainly, for me, this beats every ISP supplied router.

FYI, I will be selling a smarthub (shrink-wrapped still) shortly on ebay if interested.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Sat 10-Sep-16 00:10:07)

I should note the whole thing seems to collapse entirely if placed on a carpeted floor which blocks the vents at the bottom. Here it would drop my broadband connection regularly and get boiling to touch. Since placing it on a hard wooden surface and away from a radiator it has never caused me an issue.

It could be people have it in the window cill or on a carpet as I did initially, and noticed drop outs.

In reply to a post by hypertony:

Now that BT Home Hub 6 has been out for a few weeks so far - anyone have it yet?

Thoughts? Good/better than HH5? Any issue/gotchas that we should be aware of?

And lastly... worth the upgrade?

Had both a HH5 type a and b and i prefer the Smart Hub over both, it is rock solid and the WiFi performance is brilliant.

I've had the HH6 for a week and I'm pretty happy with it.

My wifi seems much more reliable than it was on my HH5.

With the 5 I had to separate the 5Ghz and 2.4 ghz networks as nothing would use the 5Ghz otherwise. Devices would also occasionally need their wifi switching off as despite being "connected" they could no longer send and receive data.

The only downside I've seen is the web interface on the HH6 can be a bit slow.

This thread reminds me that I need to ring BT. They never sent me a HH6 but charged me the P & P for it.

Thank you, everyone. Lots of pros, especially the good WiFi strength. I get barely signal in bedroom and in garden, so this will be a bonus.

Someone is sending it to me so waiting to receive it and with the feedback here, I'm looking forward to get it.

Hope you are not disappointed, some posts I have read on the Kitz forum suggest users are not impressed with the HH6.

I got one as a new customer and was initially impressed with it. However, the sync was lower than my old SSE router, would get random drop outs and would occasionally freeze, allowing no throughput and needing a restart. DLM triggered, so have since put my old router back to work again.

Mark