Smart Hub Pro: Hands On - The good, the bad and the ugly

[ChicChoco]

Hi all

Just going to summarise my early findings after receiving the new Smart Hub Pro and Smart WiFi Pro kit today. It’s been an awkward and frustrating journey and I’m sure some user error along the way… But I might now finally be seeing the brilliance of it. It’s here to stay but could be so much better.

Placement:

Smart Hub Pro - Front door entrance

Smart WiFi Plus - Two stories up (Town House)

The good:

After finally getting both devices running and doing some tests, my WiFi 6 speeds are much better than on the SH+ with my iPhone 14 Pro Max and Rog Ally (WiFi 6E) which for the first time hit 930mbps over WiFi with this new kit.

Now for the magic, I tested WiFi 7. I don’t currently have a native WiFi 7 device so my test case was using a laptop via Ethernet cable into the Smart WiFi Pro (as this is a WiFi 7 device right, so I thought let’s test the raw speed available over the mesh) and to be fair it’s quite a distance from the Hub. 10ms ping. 940mbps/110mbps - on fibre essentials 900. It maxed the connection over the wireless bridge with minimal latency. This is brilliant stuff and now my priority is WiFi 7 card upgrades. Not losing any speed what so ever, so impressed!

The admin panel now includes DDNS which is a welcome addition.

The kit is well designed and build quality is good, again the packaging is eco-friendly and well presented.

The bad:

It’s disappointing that the included Ethernet cables are still 5e and are actually thinner [wire] than the included cables with the SH+ (26awg on the SH+ vs 28awg on the Pro). I feel as it’s a premium product it should come with a decent network cable (at least the same thicker wire from the SH+ generation or a cat 6). Feels like a cost saving measure that just ruins the overall setup, the cable is noticeably thinner in your hand.

The admin / advanced web settings is still heavily locked down and provides little customisation for more advanced users. Would really like to be able to set custom DNS servers, and have a better UI which is quicker. If you refresh the page in advanced settings it asks for the admin password everytime which is frustrating, don’t even think this happened with the SH+? Just needs to save a cookie / auth properly. It would be nice as the setup is app-first, for the web advanced settings to be more technical like other third party consumer grade network devices.

The ugly:

The app setup process and UI is poor. It fails and has bugs which are obvious. As a software developer by day, the QA is shocking.

1) Smart WiFi Pro pairing process failed 2-3 times requiring resetting the device. App just froze saying pairing can take 7 minutes but often would say “we couldn’t pair your device”.

2) This may be user error but I disabled 2ghz band on the main wifi opting to use the compatible network for 2ghz only. This then breaks the Smart WiFi Plus from connecting (the above point was after I realised this point was also causing issues).

3) Smart Hub WiFi reports as “no signal” in the EE app but the device light is aqua and if I click into it, I can see clients connected (and my 940mbps speed test via Ethernet through the device that has no signal).

4) Web advanced settings - My network is missing connected devices, in fact, my Rog ally that connects via 6ghz isn’t even listed as connected here, not sure if this affects all 6ghz devices?

5) Smart Hub Pro update process - after pairing the hub in the app it said updating firmware, this may take up to 10 minutes. It was stuck on this screen for ages (45+ mins) and nothing happened, technical log reports no updates were applied.

6) Web advanced settings - broadband - the “connection status” shows as connnected despite the wan cable being unplugged and the front light flashing orange. This is a bug with the SH+ too; and I don’t understand how something like that can be missed?

Summary

Fantastic bit of kit delivering great speeds over WiFi 7 plus 2.5g wan/lan ports for 1.6g tier users but getting it setup is a bit clunky right now in the app today the least. Now I’ve seen that result over WiFi 7, for me, it’s well worth the price (as £10 extra) and definitely adds value to the more expensive 1.6g packages. It really just needs a UI polish up to be great.

Will post some photos next but auto marked as spam so waiting for mods to review 🙃

[Colesey]

@JimM11 good point! Can’t contain my excitement when a new product launches…sad I know

[JimM11]

@Colesey Your not alone, needs someone to go thrash the life out of it, try the permutations, send some screen captures what/can/cannot and contain all the excitement, but does look good until first FW update shut's it all down.🤔

[cliffy37]

I am not sure disabling any band is a good idea as WiFi 7 uses multiple bands at once and aggregates them (this is what gives WiFi 7 superior speed). For example on my third party router i am currently connected to the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz band giving me a connection speed of 6104Mbps

[JimM11]

@cliffy37 Kind of been why ISP's router's have been stopping separate ssid's, fixing smart channels and hiding bands away for a while now, trying to take it out of the user hands when they do not know what they are doing.👍 ?quad band router per chance..

[cliffy37]

Not holding my breath but i really hope i can set up 2 SSIDs. A 2.4Ghz for smart home equipment and a second using all bands for everything else. I am expecting to be disappointed in this though

[ChicChoco]

Yes that’s possible - there are two main SSIDs available in the new Pro hub, and a guest network so you could technically have three different SSIDs.

The main WiFi settings have a normal config and a compatibility config, although the compatibility is disabled by default. This allows any device that cannot see / connect to the main network to use a secondary network with I assume older auth tech.

I had no issues setting up devices on the main network; and so setup the compatibility network as “RAGE_IOT” for smart home devices / sky q only (that only broadcasts on 2.4ghz); and left guest WiFi off.

You still can’t split SSID names by band.

[ChicChoco]

I have the hub at the front door.

I have the booster up two storeys at opposite side of house (which is further away since the first test).

Ethernet performance from booster is still max speed, and the booster status light is teal (eg. good connection to main hub).

Walls are plasterboard, floors upstairs are wooden, only downstairs is concrete. Obviously as a town house there are two flights of stairs and two floors to penetrate between both devices. One floor is roughly 2.7m height (wall height plus floor height). So the signal is travelling approx 6m high and 8m horizontally.

GPT tells me on this basis, according to Pythagorean it’s 10m apart as the crow flies, but it’s quite difficult to measure accurately - hopefully this helps.

[ChicChoco]

This is from the main hub, with the 5E mac address being the hub and 58 mac address being the booster upstairs. 

Unfortunately I can’t get a wifi 7 channel 67 reading at the moment so this is just 2.4g/5g signals, going to order a wifi 7 card for PC shortly just been very busy.

[ChicChoco]

It seems to be broadcasting a hidden SSID which I assume could be a dedicated back haul channel? This is using the airport wifi scan utility so data is limited but I hope to do some more detailed testing 🔜 but so far I really can’t complain paying £10 a month for this kit, and wouldn’t look to buy a third party solution now.

It's made a big difference, compared to the SH+, its plug and play essentially so easy and no settings to be obsessed with tweaking. 

Hope all the 1.6gbps tier users can get their hands on them soon, must admit I’d be mad if my Ethernet network was limited to 1gbps and my whole home was hard wired.

[ChicChoco]

Ethernet nic on my laptop is 1gbps.