BT Smart Hub review: Simply the best ISP-supplied router around

The BT Smart Hub is hands down the best router the company has ever made. It might not look like much, but it’s fast, has decent range and is easy to use. It can’t match the best mesh Wi-Fi products for all out range and reliability but compared to most other wireless routers supplied by ISPs, it’s a beast – and that’s despite the fact that it’s now been out for more than a year and a half.

The question is, how good is it exactly? Can investing in a new router really improve the performance of your internet connection at home so significantly or does it all come down to the size of your house, what it’s built from and how much interference there is in your local area?

The answer to these questions is that it depends, as with all wireless routers, extenders and mesh networking products. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to have the most powerful router you can afford, and the BT Smart Hub, as we’ll see, is more than beefy. It’s a significant step up from most ISP-supplied devices.

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Price, features and setup

First, the good news. The BT Smart Hub is very reasonably priced, even free for some BT customers (although only, apparently, for new customers who haven’t taken up any kind of discount). Existing customers can upgrade for a mere £50 – and for a router of this power, that’s an amazing price.

BT’s latest home router has a total of seven internal antennae, enabling 4×4 MIMO 802.11ac wireless in the 5GHz band and 3×3 MIMO over 2.4GHz. That means a theoretical top speed of 1,700Mbits/sec and 450Mbits/sec respectively – a huge improvement over the 1,300Mbits/sec and 300Mbits/sec maximum of the previous Home Hub, and the more basic 3×3 MIMO of the Virgin Media Hub 3 and Sky Q Hub.

The BT Smart Hub forges ahead in other ways, too. It has four Gigabit Ethernet ports on the rear, where the Sky Hub has only two, and there’s also a single USB 2 port for sharing data on a USB thumb drive. Neither Virgin nor Sky Q routers have this feature. If a strong Wi-Fi signal is important to you, you’re already a BT customer, and you lack the funds to move to a full Sky Q setup or a Netgear Orbi, this router represents a very tempting proposition.

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How to set up the BT Smart Hub to get the fastest performance

As far as setup is concerned, it couldn’t be easier. If you have ADSL, simply disconnect your old BT router from the telephone socket, plug in the new Smart Hub and then switch it on. Those lucky enough to have fibre-to-the-home will need to plug their Ethernet cable into Ethernet port 1 instead. There’s no dedicated WAN port as there was with the Home Hub 5 – a slightly baffling downgrade, but not one that will have a significant impact for most people.

Once you’ve done this, simply pull out the plastic tab from the side of the router and log on to the new wireless network using the details printed on it.

Configuring the router is straightforward, too. BT has spruced up the UI, making it easier than before to understand all the various options and settings. However, I do wish that ISPs would stop merging SSIDs together. The last BT Home Hub did this and so does this one, and it means that you’re never sure whether your devices are connecting to the (potentially faster) 5GHz network or the 2.4GHz.

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If you want to keep bandwidth-hungry connections – such as video streaming – on the fastest network and others on the slower one, you’ll have to carry out a little settings surgery and separate the two networks. This is easy enough to do:

• Type 192.168.1.254 into your web browser.
• Click the Wireless box in the centre of the page.
• Click the Change Settings box at the top of the screen.
• Enter the admin password – it’s printed on the removable, pull-out tab on the right-hand side of the Smart Hub.
• On the next page look for the “Separate bands” switch at the top right. Click it, select Save and wait. You may need to log in to your Wi-Fi again after the change has taken effect. Use the Wireless key as printed on the plastic tab.

It’s also good to see that it’s relatively straightforward to set up and maintain access control on the router, something difficult to do on Sky’s system without networking know-how. You have to dig around for the setting – it’s in the Advanced section – but once you’ve found it, it’s easy to restrict internet access at particular times of the day for designated devices.

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BT Smart Hub review: Performance

The BT Home Hub 5 was the first ISP-supplied router that offered performance to rival decent third-party routers, but over time, it’s begun to look a little less impressive. The Smart Hub ups the ante in a big way.

I tested it in two ways. First, I used Iperf to gauge maximum throughput in two locations in my lon andthin Victorian terrace: in the kitchen at the back of the house, which is down a floor, a brick wall, staircase, stud wall and wooden floor away from the router; and in the first-floor master bedroom, where the ADSL line enters the house and where the router lives.

Across the board, you can see that the Sky Q Hub (on its own) is comprehensively and roundly beaten by the BT Smart Hub.

In my setup, 16MB/sec in the long-range test is seriously impressive. To reach the test PC, the signal has to pass through a wooden floor, a staircase, a brick wall, a plasterboard wall and a floor-to-ceiling kitchen cabinet stuffed with glasses, plenty of booze and baking ingredients. The distance isn’t huge, at around 10 metres, but the attenuation of the signal is high.

Equally impressive is that the BT Smart Hub beats both the Sky Q hub on its own and when compared with the full Sky Q mesh network. It shows double the throughput in the long-range test over 5GHz and a 1MB/sec advantage in the same test over 2.4GHz.

This doesn’t tell the full story, though. With the full Sky Q mesh setup, maximum potential throughput is halved each time, every time it’s repeated by one of the boxes in the mesh. In my case, the router sits in the master bedroom, is repeated once through a booster box on the landing, and another time via a Sky Q mini-box in the kitchen. Hence the result of 8.3MB/sec (equivalent to 70Mbits/sec).

In this case, then, a slower throughput rate doesn’t necessarily mean a weak signal, and for most tasks the Sky mesh delivers perfectly usable Wi-Fi in the kitchen. In fact, as you can see from the signal strength heat map below, Sky Q is superior to the BT Smart Hub.

Of course, this all largely depends on the size of your house, and how many Sky Q mini-boxes and boosters you have in your setup – but it’s clear that, despite lower throughput, the Sky Q system has the stronger signal at distance. (Note that in these diagrams, yellow indicates the strongest signal; blue the weakest.)

What does this mean? Effectively, that the signal from the BT Smart Hub will be slightly more susceptible to interference, and that in larger houses, it will also deliver slower throughput than the stronger Sky Q network (remember that throughput decreases with range) at range. 

Moreover, if you have a large house, it’s well worth thinking about splashing out on a mesh system such as the Netgear Orbi, or indeed BT’s own Whole Home Wi-Fi system. When we tested both of these recently, we found that they were able to sustain much higher throughput over far greater an area than is possible with a single router such as the BT Smart Hub.

The flipside is that such systems are far more expensive than a single BT Smart Hub. The Netgear Orbi costs £370, BT Whole Home Wi-Fi is £300 and the Sky Q mesh system is only available to customers taking out a subscription to both Sky Broadband and Sky TV, so it has niche appeal at best.

BT Smart Hub review: Problems

As with most ISP-supplied routers, the Smart Hub has had its share of teething troubles since launch, the most troublesome being the tendency of the router to repeatedly disconnect and even completly break down after a few weeks of use. There are some reports, even, that the problems were so widespread initially that BT stopped supplying the router altogether for a time.

There certainly appears to be an issue with some BT Smart Hubs – perhaps it’s a dodgy batch – but of all the test devices we’ve used (and the Smart Hub we had connected to the office DSL line until very recently) we had no such connectivity issues. 

BT Smart Hub review: Verdict and prices

Despite the reported issues, there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear and that is that the BT Smart Hub is faster and offers better range than its predecessor. And, while it’s true that the full Sky Q system or one of the new whole home wireless systems (such as the Netgear Orbi) will most likely provide a more solid signal all over your home, neither is a particularly cost-effective solution.

In short, for the majority of users already with BT, or who are thinking of moving to BT, the BT Smart Hub is a winner. It’s an excellent router in its own right, and a huge upgrade on the previous model.