Smart Hub 2 or Other solution

Hi,

I'm on ADSL2+, have BT Home Hub 4, which whilst reliable, the range is not great. I live in a 3 bedroom flat, and it struggles to load even Google when I'm farthest from the router.

My contract ends in November, but Community Fibre signed a wayleave with my landlord in mid 2021, so presumably I'll have FTTP within the next 2 years. BT offer the Smart Hub 2 free but on 2 year contracts, and individually purchasing them is £200. On Amazon, they're £35.

Would buying the SH2 on Amazon be the best idea? I'm a noob to third party routers, so looking for the easiest thing to install.

Edited by deleted (Mon 10-Apr-23 16:23:01)

The Smart Hub 2 will be simplicity itself to set up, and ought to improve wifi coverage

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

ought to improve wifi coverage

Just to add

It will, but if thats good enough for the OP's property no one can guarantee it.

This is a fair point, do believe the upgrades e.g. WIFI 4 to 6, 4G filtering and stronger 5ghz bands should be an improvement, though the extent is up in the air, especially with the limitations of ADSL.

I think switching out the routers is worth a shot, not sure what issues I may run into though.

The Home Hub 4 is a very old model so moving to a Smart Hub 2 is a good idea, but none of BTs routers have Wi-Fi 6 currently.

I wouldn't recommend buying off BT and paying full price - get a Business Smart Hub 2 from eBay - the Business versions of the routers let you change the DNS servers and enable WAN ping for things like BQM graphs.

Thanks for the advice on business versions, believe they support bridging as well! Quite a surprise SH2 doesn’t even have Wi-Fi 6, given 7 is on the horizon

do you know if the business smart hub 2 works with residential BT digital voice?

I have a SH2 and I use it with a wireless point (a repurposed router ) as I find the performance poor and unreliable. Other users on the BT forums have the same issue.

It's better than earlier models of BT hubs, but the hardware specification is getting a bit dated now

I've just had FTTP installed and the SH2 is still in the box. I've used my own non wifi router along with 3 PoE AP's for wireless. On the other hand, a family member changed from VM to BT and the SH2 was a vast improvement over the VM Hub.
So really it's very difficult to say how any ISP Hub will perform until it's up and running in situ.

Edited by Adduxi (Tue 11-Apr-23 09:43:40)