"The Home Hub 5 is a compact, stylish and remarkably well-specified router."
For
Integrated VDSL and ADSL modems
Impressive performance levels
CD-less setup and simple management
Against
Single default SSID assigned to both wavebands
Only USB 2.0 for media sharing
Limited client support for 802.11ac Wi-Fi at present
Introduction and design
The
fifth generation of the Internet router which comes free as part of
every BT Broadband contract, the BT Home Hub 5, is possibly the best
bundled router around and could even give third-party vendors a few
headaches. It's almost identical in shape and size to the
Home Hub 4, but inside the new model features integrated modems for use
with both ADSL and VDSL services, and a full set of four Gigabit
network ports plus dual-band Wi-Fi with support for the latest 802.11ac
technology.
What you get
Sign up for BT Infinity
today and you'll get the new Home Hub for free as part of the deal. You
can also get the Home Hub for nothing by renewing an existing contract.
Otherwise it costs £129 (around $202, AU$231) to buy outright, with a
discount if you're an existing Infinity users that brings it down to a
bargain £69 (around $108, AU$123). Whatever the chosen route, the Home
Hub is then posted out in a neat cardboard box designed expressly to fit
through the average letterbox. Open up the box and
inside you'll find one of the neatest and lightest broadband routers
around with very clean lines and no external antennae to spoil its good
looks. Power is supplied by an external AC adapter and, courtesy of a
couple of twist-out feet, the hub is easy to position close to the
incoming phone line, although it can't be wall mounted and on ours the
cables we plugged in lifted it off its feet.
The ports and wireless settings are all at the rearWith
integrated ADSL and VDSL modems, this hub can be used with either an
ordinary ADSL line or much faster BT Infinity service. The separate
OpenReach modem previously used to provide the VDSL connection is,
therefore, no longer required, which is good news as it consumed a fair
amount of power and ran very hot. The Home Hub does the job all by
itself and only gets moderately warm.
Connections
On
the LAN side a 4-port switch is built in to handle cabled connections
and these are now all Gigabit ports instead of one Gigabit and three
fast Ethernet as on the previous model. There's also a USB port which
can be used to share storage, typically in the form of a memory stick or
external hard disk. USB printers can also be shared through the Home
Hub, but the port is USB 2.0 only. Lastly there's the
upgraded Wi-Fi with support for both dual-band 802.n and the latest
802.11ac standard which operates solely at 5GHz. Three antennae have
been neatly integrated inside the Home Hub casing, with 802.11n clients
connecting across just two while for 802.11ac all three are available
for MIMO duties. Of course, whether they're all used will depend on the
clients. Not that many devices come with ac as standard and most plug-in
dongles come with one or two antennae.
You may need to buy a dongle to take advantage of 802.11acBT itself sells a USB dongle with two antennae – the BT 11ac Dual-Band Wi-Fi Dongle 900 which costs £34.99 (around $55, AU$63).
BT Home Hub 5 hands on
Setup and performance
There's no CD-ROM in the Home Hub box. You just plug it in
and connect to it from a browser either via a cabled port or wirelessly
using WPS or the SSID and password printed on a card located in a
plastic holder on the back. A wizard starts up as soon as you do this
and quickly takes your through the short setup process. This
all took just a couple of minutes although we did have to go back and
make a few changes to get the setup we wanted. For example, the same
SSID and security credentials are assigned to both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz
wavebands, making it hard to know which you've connected to. Moreover,
there's no band-steering as on some more expensive wireless products so
we assigned different SSIDs and passwords to each waveband to ensure we
connected to the one we wanted.
We had to change SSIDs to identify the wavebandsWe
also fine-tuned the DHCP address range employed by the router and
turned off the so-called Smart Setup option which, when a new client
connects, runs an annoying setup wizard to configure a variety of BT
options, such as parental controls. This we did via the very
straightforward management interface which, although lacking in
functionality compared to some, covers all the important bases and is
very easy to use. Our only niggle was the need to continually navigate
to the "advanced" options to get to the tools we wanted to tweak.
Impressive performer
In
terms of performance the VDSL modem gave the same broadband speeds as
when using the OpenReach modem and, used over a period of weeks,
delivered a steady connection with no dropouts. It was also a lot
quicker at establishing the connection compared to the external modem. Wireless
throughput was also impressive. Interestingly 802.11n signal range and
quality was lower at 5GHz compared to the 2.4GHz waveband but that
didn't affect the speed. Using a Core i5 desktop with on-board 802.11n
Wi-Fi we saw real-world transfer rates of up to 200Mbps using the 5GHz
band and 90Mbps using the 2.4GHz airwaves. These figures were achieved
close to the router and dropped to around 80Mbps and 30Mbps respectively
at a distance of 25 metres.
Wireless performance proved to be speedyFor
our 802.11ac tests we used an Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 Network
Adaptor fitted inside a Core i5 Intel NUC. Using this 2x2 adapter
throughput rose to around 250Mbps when close to the router and just over
130Mbps at 25 metres. That's not the fastest possible with 802.11ac but
impressive nonetheless, and very easy to configure thanks to built-in
WPS support on the Home Hub.
Verdict
We liked
The built-in VDSL modem puts the BT Home
Hub ahead of most of its rivals which tend to sell for the same price,
but rely on the availability of an OpenReach modem to work with BT
Infinity. The only exceptions that spring to mind are the latest Draytek
Vigor routers which also have built-in modems. Support
for 802.11ac is another key selling point. Admittedly it's not widely
supported on the client side at present, but that will change and it's
nice to be prepared. Moreover the 802.11n Wi-Fi is faster than on most
other ISP-supplied routers, and that's what the majority of devices use
at present.
We disliked
Our
complaints were all very minor. The use of a single SSID for both
wavebands is a bit daft, but easy enough to change. Similarly Smart
Setup can cause problems when first connecting devices like wireless
printers and set-top boxes but is, again, easy to disable. A
USB 3.0 port would also be nice, but the USB 2.0 connector is more than
adequate for most uses. It's not exactly up to NAS standard, but beats
having to manually copy and share files between systems using a USB
stick any day.
Final verdict
Apart from a few
minor niggles we were very impressed by the BT Home Hub 5. It crams in
just about everything you need to connect both wired and wireless
devices to the internet and does so with a great deal of aplomb. BT
Infinity customers will benefit most from the new hub and at just £69
it's a no-brainer even for those who don't qualify for a free upgrade. Non-BT
customers may also be interested. There are no guarantees of
compatibility and additional setup will be needed, but it should work
with other providers and beats most of their bundled routers hands-down
in terms of specification and performance.
