BT Smart Hub
Even if you aren’t a BT customer, the Smart Hub could be a cost-effective way of boosting your network
SCORE PRICE £108 (£130 inc VAT) from shop.bt.com or free with new internet packages
Officially, the BT Smart Hub only works with a BT Broadband connection – but with a bit of Googling you’ll find homebrew instructions for making it work with various other ISPs, or for setting it up as a wireless access point.
That could well be a worthwhile upgrade on what you’re using now. Although the Smart Hub’s antennae are all internal, there are seven of them, with a claimed maximum 5GHz speed of 1,733Mbits/sec, and these
proved highly effective at close and medium range, giving us a solid 25MB/sec connection in the living room and a creditable 21MB/sec in the bedroom. The tougher bathroom test took speeds down a notch, but the Smart Hub still served up a respectable 11MB/sec – more than enough bandwidth to get the full benefit of a 60Mbits/sec fibre connection.
Physical features are minimal: you get a bog-standard set of four Gigabit Ethernet ports, a WPS button and a single USB 3 socket. This provides basic file-sharing services if you plug in a USB hard disk, but there’s no sort of access control, nor any provision for streaming media files or connecting a printer.
The software side of things isn’t exactly loaded with features, either. There’s no built-in web filtering (that’s handled at the back-end for BT customers), but there is a granular scheduling tool, which works with 15-minute time slots rather than hour-long blocks. The web interface is easy to get along with, too: the presentation is simple and clear, and when you click on a button or link, the response is satisfyingly instant.
The Smart Hub is a decent wireless router, and if you’re a BT broadband customer there’s no need to look any further – so long as it supplies you with a reliable connection, which, judging from forums, isn’t always the case. Perhaps this is why secondhand units are popping up online for as little as £45 – making them a cheap experimental buy for non-BT customers hoping to get a Wi-Fi boost.