Third Party Router

Hi All,

I am looking (possibly) to replace my BT SmartHub, mainly to overcome the 14 day reboot cycle and the remote firmware upgrades.

I know I can google around, but I am keen to know what others might be using on here (tried and tested kind of thing).

I have BT TV so it needs to support multicast, this limits me a lot.

I have no real "need" to change the SmartHub, it does the job well.
Just for a test I have opted out of BTWiFi and I am keen to see if this disables the 14 day reboots as others have mentioned on the BT forums.

So the Smart Hub still does the 14 day reboot?
I have yet to get to the 14 days due to either a firmware upgrade that required a reboot or for some reason the hub needed rebooting.

It won't be the BT Wi-Fi, due to we have always had that disabled since the ADSLx days and our HH4 had always did the 14 day reboot.

You might of already said in another post, but what connection if it for ,FTTP or FTTC and what package?

I have also been thinking about this for a while now, all I have to hand is a FRITZ!Box 3390.

But I am not too sure if it can handle my whole connection which if FFTP Infinity 4.

It would be nice if it could due to it was very fast compared to the HH4 that we was using at the time for our ADSL 2+ connection.

Paul

Edited by PaulKirby (Thu 05-Jan-17 12:05:30)

If you've got money to burn then the Billion 8900AX, Tplink VR2600 or Netgear D7800 are all superb routers - all are 4x4 mu-mimo and the Billion and the tplink are both Broadcom chipset based.

Otherwise the Tplink VR900 and Billion 8800NL are excellent cheaper models though are only 3x3.

Whatever you do, stay away from Asus combined modem/routers as they are very unstable especially on vdsl2 lines.

I concur about the Billion 8800NL - I've been using it for a couple of years and it's rock solid!

In reply to a post by WelshWArrior:

I concur about the Billion 8800NL - I've been using it for a couple of years and it's rock solid!

+1 for the Billion 8800NL also

Although I now use it on my TTB connection,

I use the Smart hub 6 on my infinity. I haven't noticed the 14 day thing but it must do as the current connection time is 12 Days, 16 Hours 30 Mins 59 Secs

On my Billion I am on 26 days. That's since I replaced the TTB free router with the BIllion so it's not dropped at all.

Another vote for the Billion 8800 NL.
I've used mine on long ADSL lines and VDSL and they are excellent. I initially bought them so I could tweak the SNRM on the ADSL lines but they have also proven to be reliable on the VDSL lines too and have had no difficulty with a connection that syncs at full 80/20 and hold sync for months at a time.

BT TV - HG612 flashed with the modded firmware as the modem and my Billion 7800N as the router work with no problems for my BT TV, highly stable setup, the modem has been up for 360 days now... I reboot the router once in a while, maybe every 3 months.

To configure the Billion for BT TV ( multicast protocol) read this: https://community.bt.com/t5/YouView-Boxes/Using-a-3r...

In reply to a post by craski:

Another vote for the Billion 8800 NL.
I've used mine on long ADSL lines and VDSL and they are excellent. I initially bought them so I could tweak the SNRM on the ADSL lines but they have also proven to be reliable on the VDSL lines too and have had no difficulty with a connection that syncs at full 80/20 and hold sync for months at a time.

Nice bit of info mate - thanks

And I can but agree with you. I'm looking at mine now as it's downloading away It might only have 100mbps ports but on 80/20 is more needed? I don't transfer around home so I don't think so. It can be a pain to set up IPv6 on ( I failed at that) but my ISP does not do that yet so no probs here.

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

Hi All,

I am looking (possibly) to replace my BT SmartHub, mainly to overcome the 14 day reboot cycle and the remote firmware upgrades.

I know I can google around, but I am keen to know what others might be using on here (tried and tested kind of thing).

I have BT TV so it needs to support multicast, this limits me a lot.

I have no real "need" to change the SmartHub, it does the job well.
Just for a test I have opted out of BTWiFi and I am keen to see if this disables the 14 day reboots as others have mentioned on the BT forums.

Well for me I opted out and it did seem to stop it. I was auto opted back in about a month ago and as I said above, I have started to notice the 14 day cycle. SO I have opted out again

In reply to a post by 23Prince:

I'm looking at mine now as it's downloading away It might only have 100mbps ports but on 80/20 is more needed? I don't transfer around home so I don't think so. It can be a pain to set up IPv6 on ( I failed at that) but my ISP does not do that yet so no probs here.

Took me three hours or so on 14 Dec 2016 to get an 8800NL R2 working on AAISP IPv6/IPv4 dualstack. In modem/router mode. Rock solid ever since.

One ethernet port is gigabit. So could feed a gigabit switch if not using it as the WAN port.

Edited by RobertoS (Thu 05-Jan-17 17:21:46)