BT Home Hub doesn't make new connections occasionally

Question

I have a "BT Home Hub v2.0", which is a pretty crap piece of hardware, as to be expected from BT. Anyway, the problem is that the connection often drops out. What has me confused is that an existing connection (e.g. networked game, MMORPG, Skype) doesn't have an issue, but opening new connections gives me timeout errors. This is on both wifi and ethernet. Rebooting router helps, but only for 15 minutes when it stops again.

I've checked:

• DNS configs. I can't connect to servers by domain or IP. Pinging also fails.
• Windows and Linux. It occurs on on both XP, Vista and Ubuntu (many variants from 9.04 to 10.10.)
• Wi-Fi vs. Ethernet. It occurs on both. However, computer-to-computer connections are not affected.
• Turning off BitTorrent to see if BT are throttling it - no effect.

Someone gave me a Belkin N Wireless ADSL router. Would I be able to set this up with the connection and do people think it would be better?

I've called BT to no avail, tech support is useless as always. What's next?

Answer 1

I agree that the BT Home Hub is complete and utter rubbish. I replaced one at a customer's home only the other day. Their problem was that the internal DHCP server had got completely and utterly messed up and had allocated all the IP addresses in the pool to one client. Trying to get into the settings to lock the client down to a specific IP just rebooted the Home Hub every time.

I used to have one where I used to live. If I transferred too much data through the wired network (eg some video files) it would... yes, you guessed it... reboot the Home Hub.

So yes, replace it with something better as soon as possible.

The Belkin will be ideal.

Just punch your BT Internet username and password into its configuration, make sure it's set to PPPoA, and you should be good to go.

Setting up the wireless should be easy enough - it may have wireless security disabled by default, so make sure you go in and switch on WPA2.

All this should be detailed in the manual that came with it (that may be on the CD).