BT Home Hub

It's this sort of thing that inspired me to start this blog in the first place. Today, the BT Home Hub absolutely must be discussed. You'll probably have heard recently about the hype surrounding the BT FON Community Wireless agreement, which allows owners of the BT Home Hub to share a small portion of their internet bandwidth wirelessly, and receiving free access to the BT FON network elsewhere. Sounds like a pretty good idea, right?

Purely out of interest, I opted into the service. I waited a couple of days, and wake up one morning to find that the software on my BT Home Hub has been updated and that suddenly, my router is broadcasting a BTOpenzone access point too. Absolutely intrigued, I connect to the BTOpenzone network and try it out. Looking pretty good so far. Users connecting to the Openzone network can't access your network, so it's pretty secure in that respect, and the login and logout process was relatively harmless.

So far, I'm quite impressed, not to mention that I am now also equipped with an account that lets me log onto wireless networks in other places for no additional cost. However! This new software update isn't set to please in other respects...

Okay. It boasts a few nice updates. Time servers are working well now (albeit without Summer Time options so most users are stuck in the past at the moment), and there's now additional support for BT Textphones when connecting through the BT Broadband Talk service. The admin interface has been slightly revised, and provides a few functions to make basic tasks like setting your wireless key easier. Not bad for a minor update.

What's the problem, then?

BT, in adding a few minor features, broke a few major ones. That's right. This new hub software takes more steps back than it does forward.

You have to give BT credit for making use of the MSSID (Multiple Service Set Identifiers) functionality in the hub, which has been there for a long time and has remained unused, although I would suggest that there is a fairly good reason that it's remained unused. The MSSID support in the BT Home Hub is awful. It's instability doesn't just affect the wireless, either, but can cause the entire device to reboot whenever it pleases. That's fantastic while you are trying to complete university applications using the UCAS e-wazabang online application process, of course. I know that the MSSID functionality is awful because I've experimented with it before, using the (somewhat) secret telnet admin panel, and my attempts to make it do anything useful resulted in the router rebooting and forgetting the MSSID settings that I'd put in. BT's attempt to use the MSSID functionality for the BT FON sharing has prompted the unprecented reboot of my hub several times now. Spiffing.

Now, this brings me onto my next point. The more tech-savvy BT Home Hub owners will probably be aware of the telnet interface that lets you play with all of the internal BT Home Hub settings (y'know, telnet api.home and all that). BT kindly took the liberty of blocking this functionality, so don't expect to be using that, either. Naturally, this is just fantastic when you are experiencing issues with your MSSID setup, that was nicely pushed to you with the latest software update, which can only be changed or fixed using the telnet admin panel.

Don't expect opting out of the BT FON service to immediately fix your problems, either. I opted out around 17 hours ago, and my BT Home Hub still believes that I am a member of the service and is still broadcasting the BTOpenzone wireless spot. My guess is that it could take anything from a few hours to a few weeks for this to flush out properly, so that I can return to my usual biddings without being interrupted by horrible horrible reboots.

Not to mention that the new unsecured BTOpenzone wireless network has confused every computer connected to my wireless network, since it is unsecured (and obviously the computer wants to try and connect to whatever it can), and using the same wireless channel as my own wireless network.

Now, I always considered the BT Home Hub a pretty nice piece of engineering because it allowed a great deal of control using the flexible admin control panel, just like any decent router should. However, I can't really vouch for that anymore knowing that this control panel is now, well, not there. This leaves me with a setup that is relatively unstable that I can't fix.

Thanks BT. You just destroyed my faith.