Has anyone missed me? :)

Sadly, I do.

When I moved last year, I went to go and dig my router out from one of the packing boxes and the engineer told me not to bother as he would give me a nice new Superhub. Very nice, thinks I - - then the trouble started.

We went to hell and back with broadband and TV faults caused by issues in the cabinet in the street, and in the end I sent an email to the CEO at Virgin which suddenly sparked them into life and got the problems sorted.

Then the broadband started playing up, dropping connections left right and centre, and even when I was connected the speeds were pretty awful for the most part. I even went and bought a new laptop thinking that it was my old one that was faulty - imagine how 'pleased' I was when the new laptop did exactly the same as the old one!

A further load of faffing about (I gave up speaking to India completely), and I was on the verge of telling them where to shove their broadband when I happened to speak to a bloke that I knew worked for Virgin. He advised that I dig out my old 'N' router, connect it to the Superhub via an ethernet cable, and put the Superhub into modem only mode.

I did this, and haven't looked back since.

From what I can gather, some hubs are OK, but many are as flaky as hell, and you need to go through numerous call-outs etc from Virgin before you get a resolution - the alternative is to simply do as I have done and bolt on your own 'N' router.

 

I should add, that as well as the Superhubs being flaky, their problems seem to be greatly exacerbated if they are used with the wrong power supply - so if an engineer has been out, and swapped the hub without changing the power adaptor it can actually make matters worse.

The process of doubling the speeds also seems to upset the apple-cart in entire areas for a couple of weeks after the increase is done; don't know why, but I've seen a few posts on DS with people inferring that they have had problems post speed upgrade.

And lastly, the Superhubs seem to be worse if you are in a neighbourhood where there are a number of hubs in your neighbours homes - whether they keep trying to out-range each other or what, I have no idea. There is a bit of free software called inSSIDer (just Google it) which lets you see how many routers are within range, and what channels they are working on.

 

Almost certainly, and apparently the superhubs are really bad at it!