Bloody Home Hub!

We may be seen as fools for sticking with BT for our home interent connection but we've had reasonable service with BT and they did offer us a new Home Hub 2.0 which was nice... Until it didn't arrive!

Having contacted them about this lack of equipment several weeks later, we did get a hub & hub phone sent fairly quickly, with apologies and having connected it to the computer, I was thrilled to find set up was pretty pain-free and - OMG - we were able to file / printer share on the home network for the first time ever!! Yay!

Two big thumbs up for BT Home Hub...?

Well, on Friday, the whole thing went tits up (following a software upgrade it wanted to make of it's own accord)! Whole wireless network stopped working for no apparent reason! Grrr!

Sudden;y, the Mobile Phone & Laptop just simply wouldn't connect to the network! Phone couldn't even find the wireless signal and the laptop said it had a great connection but wouldn't load any internet pages!

This has been a real headache to sort out! Several hours wasted on refining settings, checking the help topics in the manual, the online help, the help programmes installed with the hub and still not a blip of improvement on the connection front - frustratingly, the main PC connected fine so it kept saying everything was ok!!

However... In their uselessness regarding delivery of equipment, BT had (shhh - don't tell) sent us a second home hub! Rather than attempting customer services for a long drawn out: "have you tried turning it off and on again" conversation, going through all the steps I've already repeatedly taken, we figured it might not hurt to just try the new hub - why didn't we do this hours ago?

Whole thing works great again! File sharing, internet, printing... I've re-packed the old hub in the box all neat and tidy like - they can have it back if they want... I'm sticking with the new version - and just to ensure there're no more upsets, I've disabled all the BT software from the main system! Don't want updates and such messing up a configuration that works! I reckon the old hub was just faulty but I don't want to take the risk of software settings being a root cause!

Let's see how happy we stay this time...!?

So, would I recommend the BT Home Hub? Well, it looks good, allows easy file / printer sharing, has a broadband phone with it (may cost more but we got it free!) and it's simple to set up... But if they're gonna go pop at the slightest moment of software upgrades, I may have to re-consider our internet supplier when the contract comes up for review...! BT don't have the fastest speeds on the market (though we get fast-enough!) and despite great customer service in the past, I do want (and expect) a fully functioning, hassle-free service! Jxx