Has anyone got any information about the BT home hub?

I'm looking to get away from Pipex ASAP as they've put my connection on a 15GB bandwidth limit without letting me know - I've also been told I'm on 8mb (and am paying for it) when I'm still getting 2mb speeds - the exchange is about 50m away from my house.

Also I'm sick of their packet shaping at peak times, despite them claiming they don't.

I'm looking to change to BT, and they don't seem to do bog standard internet anymore, and only want to do it using their home hub. I'm a bit curious about their Home Hub and have a few questions as there's bound to be people here who use it.

Does anyone use one? is it good or bad?

Do they work with media streamers properly? (my dad has a Netgear MP101 streamer)

Does it have a built-in firewall?

Can I forward ports easily if needed?

Does the phone through the internet take up much bandwidth? (ie. will it lag me out of online games when my mum uses the phone?)

Does it have UPnP abilities?


these are the only questions I can think of for now, but I may think up of more later

Daym....

I have the home hub and it works great, never had any faults with it. (Pc is ethernet connected and we have a laptop which is used alot to)

I don't have the phone through the internet so I don't have a clue how it is, however I am very skeptical about it, a friend the other day was having bad connection problems all day and couldn't phone his ISP to find out why, because the connection kept dropping. They cut mine off by accident a month or so ago, while updating the lines they broke it by accident apparently so we had to wait a week for it to be put back on, so with the internet phone we wouldn't have been best pleased.

Apart from that though that's the only problems with the hub and BT in the past year, although I don't know why they don't do normal packages anymore, we had to re subscribe for the broadband when they "broke it" for the basic 2gb download limit family pack thing. (They never check it though, had some months i've downloaded near 20gb)

Easy to install and stuff but with your questions and stuff I doubt that's going to be an issue either way...

Oh yea, come to think of it I had some installation problems, somehow when installing it the last part failed, when it was creating the connection or something, and would never work. So I gave up on it and when I clicked internet explorer it worked, so if there is a firewall mine isn't activated nor so I have access to anything in the router, sucky but thats life. (And my lazy ass not attemtping to fix it)

Bit of a long post for not giving much relevant info, just wanted to atleast give it a thumbs up from me anyway.

GL.

They keep offering me a home hub and I'm far too suspicious of them to accept it. Had terrible problems with them in the first year of broadband, constantly loosing connection with BT (internet) constantly blaming BT (who lay the phone lines) and vice versa, the customer service was really shoddy and these problems magically seemed to cure themselves shortly before our contract ran out and we haven't had any issues with BT (as in the internet company) since. We did have another problem with the phone line company though, following a cock up they made by reconnecting us to the wrong line (so we were receiving and making calls through somebody else's phone number) after the telephone exchange, which is on higher ground than my house mysteriously suffered flood damage

I got a home hub (mainly because it came with package) and it's OK I guess.
The phones work reasonably well, the router is ok, though it only has 2 ethernet ports.


Does anyone use one? is it good or bad?

It's OK

Do they work with media streamers properly? (my dad has a Netgear MP101 streamer)

Never tried, can't see why it wouldn't

Does it have a built-in firewall?

Yes

Can I forward ports easily if needed?

Yes (including a DMZ option)

Does the phone through the internet take up much bandwidth? (ie. will it lag me out of online games when my mum uses the phone?)

I can't tell when they are being used - so not much.

Does it have UPnP abilities?

Yes, though I haven't tried them.

All in all I would say if it's a freebie, then go for it, but don't spend if you already have, or can pick up a decent modem/router. The 3com I had before I got the home hub worked just as well, albeit without the phone, and had more ethernet ports.