TalkTalk Wi-Fi Hub
If you’re a TalkTalk customer with an older router, it’s worth the upgrade – but key features are missing for now
SCORE PRICE £25 (£30 inc VAT) for existing customers, free with new fibre internet packages from talktalk.co.uk
TalkTalk is a decent internet service provider, but historically the poor performance of its bundled “Super Router” has done it no favours. Since May, the company has been rolling out a new hub that aims to improve matters.
And we’ve got to say, we can’t fault the new hub for speed. At close and medium-range, this unassuming little box, with no external antennae, proved just as fast as Netgear’s mighty Nighthawk X10 – and while it wasn’t quite able to keep up the pace at long range, it got impressively close, ranking fourth in a field of 13.
The feature set is very limited, though. You get four Gigabit Ethernet sockets and a WPS button, but no USB connectors, so you can forget about file and printer sharing. Video streaming is out too.
Indeed, when you open up the web portal you’ll find there’s practically nothing to configure – no VPN support, no option to use the hub as a bridge or access point and no way to set up a guest network. There’s also zero in the way of parental controls: the assumption is that you’ll use TalkTalk’s hosted HomeSafe service, but this is a very blunt instrument as it doesn’t let you apply custom restrictions to individual devices.
The one area where the Wi-Fi Hub exceeded our expectations was dynamic DNS support: you can choose from seven different services, and once you’ve provided your credentials the router handles everything else. And to be fair, the core router functions – port forwarding, MAC address filtering and so forth – are all present and correct.
The Wi-Fi Hub is still pretty new, so we’re optimistic that future updates might fill in some of the missing features. For now, though, it’s very much a case of performance at the expense of all else. Still, that’s not a terrible proposition, and if you’re an existing TalkTalk customer with the older router, the £30 upgrade charge is pretty reasonable. You can also buy it if you’re with another ISP, although in this case you’ll have to pay the full £120 RRP, which makes it slightly less of a bargain.