Is your black box actually the router of all evil?
Routers are brilliant – but not brilliant enough if you get one from your broadband provider
I’m torn. Part of me wants to drop to my knees and worship the genuine modernday miracle that is my router. But part of me also wants to punch its flashing blue lights out.
Let’s start with the miraculous bit. The things that even the bog-standard routers dished out by your broadband provider can pull off are nothing short of gobsmacking.
Looking at my router settings now, there are ten different devices connected to it by various means. Laptops, tablets, phones, games consoles, radios, an internet sodding doorbell, for goodness sake. And this is a quiet time. The kids are at school and my partner’s at work. If I looked again at 7pm that device tally would jump by 50%, perhaps even double.
The router’s doing stuff constantly, around the clock. A little utility tells me my work laptop alone (I work from home) parses around 2GB of data per weekday. The always-on Xbox is updating games in the background, our smartphones are receiving notifications, the doorbell’s motion sensors are on the constant lookout for couriers who can’t even be arsed to ring the thing before shoving a card through my door (don’t get me started). The router’s doing a dozen different things at once.
But the speed at which it does all this stuff is the bit that blows my mind. Open a command prompt, type “ping google.com” and watch as your router passes tiny packets of data back and forth between your computer and Google’s servers at incomprehensible speeds. Mine just did it an average speed of 16 milliseconds. In a tiny fraction of the time it takes the human eye to blink (around 100 to 400 milliseconds according to the Harvard Database of Useful Biological Numbers), a piece of data has been sent wirelessly from my laptop to my router, through several hops on the internet to Google’s servers located in a different continent and made its way back again.
It’s why, when a teenager called Chad in Sacramento pulls the trigger button on his Xbox controller and shoots my Fortnite character through the back of the head, we both see it in real-time as if we were in the same room. Or, to give a more PC Pro- esque example, why a company such as WANdisco can synchronise two copies of entire databases in different continents at the same time. You can’t help but marvel at it.
And then… I’ve just spent half an hour this morning trying to convince the aforementioned doorbell to see my damned router. Every other device in the house could see the router, so the doorbell’s probably to blame, but only once the router was fully reset did the two get back on speaking terms. And that’s not an isolated incident: once in a while a device will moan it’s been kicked off my router, either on its own or as part of a mass walkout prompted by the router taking five and resetting itself.
My router is a BT Home Hub, admittedly a device that’s a little long in the tooth now, but only because my experience of the more modern Smart Hub was very different to that of our Labs test. I tried three different Smart Hubs, but repeated dropped connections and a Smart Hub sulking with a glowing orange light became so common that I eventually reverted to the more reliable older model.
Which brings us to the overall conclusion of the Labs and the repeated findings of PC Pro readers in our annual Excellence Awards: the ownbrand routers dished out by the broadband providers just aren’t that good. One solitary, sympathy star for the Sky Q Hub; two stars for the Virgin Media Hub; a middling three stars for the recently revamped TalkTalk Wi-Fi Hub. The aforementioned BT Smart Hub is the best performing router in our tests, but bear in mind there’s no practical way to Labs test how well a router holds onto an internet connection.
It’s got be the falsest of false economies for the broadband providers. Yes, they’re banging out hundreds of thousands of these units every year, but surely the few quid scraped off the router hardware bill is completely outweighed by the cost of supporting millions of customers with these duff routers? BT sent me three different Smart Hubs alone, not to mention the hours I spent speaking to the script readers on the BT technical support lines.
One of my other ventures is a website that answers people’s common tech problems. By far the most searched for articles on that site are those that explain what the coloured warning lights on various ISP-branded routers indicate.
Routers are astonishing things, helping us to send and receive data at speeds that are almost impossible to comprehend. But it’s also impossible to comprehend why the companies that dominate our broadband market are so reluctant to spend a little extra and make their routers even more miraculous than they already are.
Once in a while, a device will moan it’s been kicked off my router, either on its own or as part of a mass walkout