EE Home hub might just be the worst router I've ever used

[couling]

Mostly posting this to vent my frustration...

I've been in IT a long time. I bought my first wifi router in 2004. It was okay, not great, wifi devices from the early 2000s were not great by modern standards. As time has gone on I stopped buying my own router because the one provided by various ISPs was usually "good enough". But now, 22 years later I recently upgraded to Full Fiber and switched to EE. I think the Fiber connection might be really good. But I can't really tell...

... because this EE Hub is the worst router I've ever experienced. I'm now looking at forking out another £100 because the one provided by EE isn't fit for purpose.

• It has randomly rebooted more than 10 times so far while I'm on the internet in the past two weeks. It's probably rebooted a lot more. 3 of them kicked me out of important work calls.
• Several times it's somehow reset some but not all of its settings resulting in the DHCP server handing out addresses that it wasn't supposed to and causing IP conflicts.
• It has problems routing traffic from the WiFi to wired to some wifi devices.. I've been having connectivity issues from my laptop to a gigabit wired device with pings spiking up to 1,600ms plus some packet loss. Yet this same device has consistent 2ms pings to another wired device. And I can ping the other device with a consistent 8-10ms ping from my laptop, no spikes, no packet loss. Likewise, my laptop can ping google with 11-17ms pings. So this is not my laptop wifi playing up.
• I strongly suspect I'm not getting the value for money out of the fiber connection because the Wifi does just seem slow. Certainly slower than I'd had on other Wifi 6 networks.

In minor, lesser gripes:

• It now forces HTTPs when you go to the admin page, but offers no mechanism to provide a certificate and is hard-coded to use a somewhat useless certificate for bthomehub.home
• The admin password treats short (low entropy) passwords as only a warning, but absolutely prohibits a long (high entropy) password without a number 🙃
• The rare times I need to configure it, UI is extraordinarily slow, slower even that the 8 year old bt home hub I was using previously.

[JimM11]

@couling Which one do you have see the link below and what matches yours!

https://ee.co.uk/help/broadband/getting-started/compare-our-range-of-broadband-hubs

[couling]

Smart Hub 6 Plus

[JimM11]

@couling From earlier in your post i would just do your own Router option and take it from that point forward!

[bobpullen]

@couling - how complex is your local network in terms of additional extenders, switches, third party networking kit and the like? Unless you've a dud, something must be throwing it off for it to physically reboot at that frequency! Assume the LED cycles green when it happens? (classic sign of a reboot).

I'm not using a Smart Hub Plus 6 at the mo - but when I was - it was pretty solid, and I like to think my network is a reasonably complex/taxing one.

[couling]

@bobpullen  I can’t imagine any circumstance where network complexity would legitimately cause a router to reboot. But as it happens it’s a pretty simple network. ~20 intermittent WiFi devices with 2 wired computers and no other switches or routers,  not even a mesh WiFi.

And yes, by rebooted I mean all devices suddenly drop off WiFi and the router logs are blank except for “startup” messages timestamped  in the last minute or two. The router certainly rebooted.

[JimM11]

@couling What is the Status showing to you for the Network Uptime and the System Uptime! You may just be needing to possibly change the PSU out or look at Power socket arrangement, be careful if you are plugged into a power strip, the filtered spike protect ones are normally very good, but cheap ones can easily lose connection with a load on them! 

Got a full 75 days of logging if you need while checking for a reported oops that slowdown on system occurs due to log fill.

[couling]

Well swapped it out for a mid range cheap brand (~£180). Didn't come here to plug any brand so won't say exactly what. Suffice to say, 24 hours and going strong.

I did a speed test from my laptop before and after swapping it and got triple 🏎️💨 the speed from the new one. So yeah, the Smart Hub 6 Plus was definitely not giving me the internet I'd paid for.

All other gripes sorted.

[JimM11]

@couling Not going to say too much, but glad you listened!

[bobpullen]

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@couling wrote:

@bobpullen  I can’t imagine any circumstance where network complexity would legitimately cause a router to reboot. But as it happens it’s a pretty simple network. ~20 intermittent WiFi devices with 2 wired computers and no other switches or routers,  not even a mesh WiFi.

And yes, by rebooted I mean all devices suddenly drop off WiFi and the router logs are blank except for “startup” messages timestamped  in the last minute or two. The router certainly rebooted.

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Thanks, definitely an odd one in which case. I do have switches, about double the volume of Wi-Fi clients and extenders etc. and I could go weeks without any downtime. Wi-Fi would also do > 1Gbps on a good day too.

Glad you've fixed in in a way. Bit disappointing it involved you having to put your hand in your pocket though!