We have one of the "older" ones and it gets warm but I wouldn't say it's any worse than other kit we've had in the past. We had a speedtouch 530 once that you could cook an egg on.

The openreach modem has been pretty much flawless for us so far (after 13 months)

Got a DGN 2200 running here and that feels like a hot water bottle.

Spend £25 on an unknown Chinese import, that may or may not get through customs, may or may not work for a long time, or let Openreach keep replacing their modem...mmmm.

A reason they've gone two box on this, is that the FTTP lines will need a terminating box, and thus ISP's can supply the same router to customers for both FTTC or FTTP.

Four HG612s (two Rev.1s, two Rev. 2) hav been running almost continuously for the last two months. One of them periodically overheats. It reboots and then hangs at the bootloader. Once cooled it runs fine for a while.

The 6368 processor at the heart of the HG612 is in a BGA (ball grid array) package.

According to Wikipedia..

A disadvantage of BGAs is that the solder balls cannot flex in the way that longer leads can. As with all surface mount devices, bending, due to a difference in coefficient of thermal expansion between PCB substrate and BGA (thermal stress), or flexing and vibration (mechanical stress) can cause the solder joints to fracture.

Thermal expansion issues can be overcome by matching the mechanical and thermal characteristics of the PCB to those of the package. Typically, plastic BGA devices more closely match the PCB thermal characteristics than ceramic devices.

Thermal stress of the solder ball joints in the 6368 is perhaps the main cause of faults of the HG612.

It would be interesting to keep log the core temperature in the Huawei. Maybe there are CPU registers like there are in an x86, holding real-time core thermal data but if so, Broadcom doesn't make the specs public.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

Strange reply ??
To decide not to take a service because it means having to have two boxes ?
Little has changed ? Well for a similar price you could be going much faster, you also mention that you upload from your server, surely 10meg upstream would make this run much better ?

V.odd.

Surely a single box solution is better than two? Does each require a power connection?

Regarding my weather uploads it only involves a few hundred bytes every few minutes so Infinity isn't really required. Sledgehammer / nut!

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Couple of years - more like 18 months since BT Infinity launch, remembering that Inifinity is just BT Retails brand name for FTTC and FTTP products.

At some point in the future the hardware will change to customer choice, but that is some time off as VDSL2 hardware and customers buying their own modem is not that common anywhere. In fact for many ADSL lines ISP supplied modems are very common.

I've never used a BT supplied modem. Always preferred Netgear. But if all of you are saying the supplied kit os okay I may review that decision especially when commercial kit is still some way off.

Yep.


Modem uses it's own power and connects to the phone line.
Then it's networked by cable to the Home Hub or other router which also needs it's own power.

I believe if you only have one computer you can just connect directly to the modem.

You almost certainly could connect direct if with one PC but don't forget the router does a pretty good job as a firewall and so you would need to make sure your PC is especially secure if you are connecting direct.

I am 4 months in for BT infinity service - as per other members experiences the first BT Openreach box packed up within the first couple of weeks

BT were quick enough to replace the unit for another HG612 unit - this new one is perched on the windowsill, on its back/side (lan/power ports down) held in place by a lump of blu-tak. The idea being it keeps cool and so far for approx the last 3 months or so it's been working perfectly and doesn't get hot at all

I pretty quicker ditched the BT HH3 for a Netgear WNDR3700 and this works flawlessly

I'm getting 35814 Kbps down and 8225 Kbps up from the speedtester website no downtime since the HG612 was swapped out

Can't speak for the Home Hub but the modem's been fine for me since April and the only downtime caused by local power cuts (must get a UPS!) , there have been reports of problems and I suspect it's not as reliable as OpenReach would like but I suspect it's not all that much in %age terms.

There's a new version now, anyway, which will hopefully be more reliable.

Sigh - spoke too soon, modem died over the weekend and OR engineer hopefully bringing a shiny new one later this morning.

Mounted vertically and never seemed to get that warm but the connection became flakey and dropped out most of Sunday (didn't notice as we were out), then picked up a bit overnight before finally giving up the ghost yesterday morning.

It's a good job I had picked up a spare...