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

My first one was fine for 6 weeks then kept restarting

so i got a replacement which was even worse with in 3-4 days it started disconnecting wifi randomly/locking up

i ended up buying a replacement TP-link.

Had mine a couple of months now. Not impressed so back to HG612.

Too many reliability issues - overheating and restarting. Hopefully a firmware update will sort the issues because the Wireless was very good.

Edited by WelshWArrior (Tue 13-Sep-16 13:11:54)

Can't you feed it from the HG612?

To be honest, I have no need. I have 3 Cisco AiroNet APs in the house as it is which more than cover the whole place and garden

In reply to a post by WelshWArrior:

Had mine a couple of months now. Not impressed so back to HG612.

Too many reliability issues - overheating and restarting. Hopefully a firmware update will sort the issues because the Wireless was very good.

Well I tried our free Smart Hub for 5 days a couple of weeks ago on our ADSL2+ connection. It was to originally to set it up ready for our FTTP order to be installed (still waiting BTW)

But the issues we had was the latency was a lot higher, it was stable for 3 days with absolutely no issues at all, then came all the disconnects every few mins to every hour.

I got that fed up of it so I went back to my HH4 and put the Smart Hub back in its box.

I never had any heat issues or any constant rebooting of the hub, only the dropping of the connection.

There was some cosmetic issue with the GUI and some of the information displaying wrong information etc, but apart from that it wasn't that bad.

I am sure it will be fine when the engineers come out to do our external and internal work.

But in my eyes the Smart Hub isn't that smart on ADSLx.

Paul

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Can't you feed it from the HG612?

You can with the smart hub 6b which is being sent to fttp users but the standard smart hub 6a (which everyone else gets) does not have that ability, its something to do with the firmware.

I was told by one of the bt mods that hub team are aware of the desire to be able to use a modem as backup and may add this ability in a future firmware update, mind you im not holding my breath as the list of problems people are having over on the bt forums is looking quite large.


http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10477...

The only difference in the two from the outside is the 6a has lan4 on the back and the 6b has wan in red instead of lan4

On a side note i've seen the hub6's in currys/pc world for sale for £99 but couldn't tell which one it was from the outside and the sales rep wasn't willing to open one to find out.

In reply to a post by omnius:

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Can't you feed it from the HG612?

You can with the smart hub 6b which is being sent to fttp users but the standard smart hub 6a (which everyone else gets) does not have that ability, its something to do with the firmware.

I was told by one of the bt mods that hub team are aware of the desire to be able to use a modem as backup and may add this ability in a future firmware update, mind you im not holding my breath as the list of problems people are having over on the bt forums is looking quite large.


http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10477...

The only difference in the two from the outside is the 6a has lan4 on the back and the 6b has wan in red instead of lan4

On a side note i've seen the hub6's in currys/pc world for sale for £99 but couldn't tell which one it was from the outside and the sales rep wasn't willing to open one to find out.

FTTP versions of the Smart Hub are also Type A, I have one and it has a red label saying WAN where LAN port 4 would be.

Shown here is a picture of my Smart Hub.

According to the GUI it says it works on ADSL, VDSL which uses the DSL RJ11 socket connected to the line and FTTP which uses the WAN RJ45 socket connected to the ONT.

Paul

Type B won't be far behind the Type A

After reading all this negative stuff about the 6, and having seen a fair few in situ .... Today I met my first truly faulty one .... it would sync, eventually but only at 2 meg ish .... My tester showed the line as capable of 72 meg ....

Och well.

I wonder how many homeowners would have simply said "BT broadband sucks" or just assumed their netflix was buffering because "it's peak times."

A friend of mine with a network 3 phone recently said "there's too many people in London sucking the reception, 3 can't do anything." It always amazes me what people conclude lol.

I still have to say my hh6 is the best hub I've ever owned. It beats the talktalk hg633 which is just a nightmare.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Wed 14-Sep-16 23:59:14)

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

A friend of mine with a network 3 phone recently said "there's too many people in London sucking the reception, 3 can't do anything." It always amazes me what people conclude lol.

Although, there may be some truth in that: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/09/06/three...

"Dave Dyson said his bigger rivals had deliberately acquired rights to airwaves they did not need in order to stop Three competing properly in the interests of consumers."