50 meg super hub issues

Had my connection "upgraded" from 20 to 50 meg on Friday. Upgrade itself was painless, however, my issue seems to be against this "super hub". It appears so far to be the biggest pile of poo known to man. Throughput isn't an issue, just seems the router is very unreliable.
Its a VMDG480 so one of the newer re-branded Netgear jobbies. Can't find that much info on it but suspect it suffers from the same smallish NAT table that the virgin issued Netgear WGR614 did.
My issue is that after 45 minutes to an hour it seems to dump my laptop connection when using the wired ethernet. Will see how the wireless goes by the morning.
I can ping the router IP (not on the default range as it conflicts with one at work). I can access the management interface and it says all is well. Its telling more fibs than a politician.
It simply seems to refuse to route anything to the outside world.
I've got some more devices swapped over to it now, and see how it goes but have others had issues with the ruddy things?
The separate netgear router worked fine for 2 years. Only thing was restarting the modem after a few weeks as it would loose the will to live. I could cope that, not every hour as yesterday.
I know I need to raise it with them, but has anyone else had issues with them?
If the magic firmware updare to allow bridge mode ever appeared I'd go back to the old setup which worked in a reasonable way.
I've disabled the SPI firewall and all the other stuff and it still seems to wig out. I can now try comming back in from the outside world and see if the modem responds, even if the router part shuts off.

there are a lot of users complaining about the superhub. i've got the older seperate modem and router, and although the supplied router was rubbish at least i could swap it for my own. consensus seems to be if you call and shout loud enough and if you get the right person you might be able to swap yours for one of the old standalone modems, providing they have stocks left. apparently the firmware in the superhub is rubbish as well - you cant even set it as "modem-only", but vm have said they are working on a firmware upgrade to enable this.

You don't have a cat in hells chance of getting it swapped for a modem.

It seems to work for me using wired connections with no problems after turning off the SPI (firewall features) and flood detection (find these in Advanced settings/Services). I turned UPnP off too as I don't need it and have found it can cause problems with some routers.

I don't use P2P which is well known for busting iffy routers by blowing their maximum supported connections.

I only use wireless for phone and iPad but even that light usage has caused it problems a couple of times and I've had to reboot it before I could connect.

Firmware that supports bridge mode is promised but no timesscale was given.

That would be a deal breaker for me having to use an ISP router. Is it not possible to buy a modem and use that instead?

You can only use VM supplied modems on cable. VM have promised bridge mode support it's just a question of time. If you desperately needed to use your own router in the interim you could always put it in the hub DMZ. It would of course then be double NATed which I suppose could cause an issue but I've added my old router without even DMZing it for WiFi use since having the connection problem. Ruling out what is probably the best BB in the country when the "own router" issue will eventually be resolved isn't the best way forward imo.

Since my original post I've been playing around with mine as I had seen mention that just turning off the flood detection was enough so mine is now set like that with the SPI back on - I think turning it off automatically disables the flood detection anyway. I'll see how it goes.

I don't understand why ISP's don't give us a choice between modem and modem router. The market for people wanting only a modem can't be that small? Virgin are not in my area yet so it's not an immediate problem but it would put me off having a router forced on me. I prefer to use my Apple Base Station because it supports NAT-PMP, useful for Back to my Mac and MobileMe services which I use extensively.

Virgin have only recently gone from modem + free router (which you could obviously swap) to the combined modem/routers. They've promised a firmware that supports bridge mode and given their rate of network expansion that is likely to be available before they come your way. Come to that there'll likely be universal FTTP before then too as they have enormous debts to finance before they consider digging up roads ever again.

Well I wish they would hurry up and get the bridge mode released. Been months from the look of it. A lot of routers have small NAT tables, but not much of an issue for me. All I want is a service that works, and if it doesn't work - ie, provide an interweb connection then its goods/service not fit for the purpose that they are sold.
I'll try removing uPNP - didn't cause me any issues on the previously supplied netgear separate units so no reason to do it with this one

I had the new 'superhub' installed a few days ago, and already i am sick of it. Cant connect wont connect should be their advertising space. Im paying for a service im not receiving. Complete and utter [censored]!

You can already achieve this with the current firmware, though it's more fiddly. Essentially it involves making your seperate router static in the superhub's network, and then placing it in the DMZ. All traffic then gets passed to your own router.