Question UK Modem/Router recommendations to replace BT SmartHub 2 ?

[LeVzi]

Hi everyone, always had great success here.

I am in the UK and currently stuck using the BT SmartHub 2. I had purchased the VR2100 from TP Link, but after a couple of RMA's , these units simply wouldn't work with my connection.

The connection is perfect with the SmartHub 2 , but obviously I'd prefer to be able to split the WiFi bands and have QoS available, but this BT hub doesn't do that.

So after the TP Link mess, i'm looking for recommendations , ASUS, Draytek etc.
My max FTTC speeds are 71 down 19 up. I connect wirelessly to the router because my PC is too far from the router, but I use an Archer T9UH WiFi Adapter and get really amazing low latency connections normally, and I can game no problem.

THanks in advance.

 

[bill001g]

Does the smarthub not let you assign different SSID to the 2.4 and 5 band ?

The wifi part most routers have that ability so it is strange the smarthub would not. QoS is pretty much useless in most routers.
You technically can't actually do QoS on download because the ISP chooses what traffic to send and they don't care. By the time your router gets involved the bandwidth is already consumed and it can't just un delete traffic that was dropped by the ISP and create something else.
All so called QoS on the download is trying to trick the end client into requesting less data. You can to a point cap certain types of traffic leaving bandwidth for others applications but it tends to be tedious to setup. A more modern method is to use something commonly called "cake" to try to treat all traffic equally. This mostly helps games more than say traffic that would need higher bandwidths because a small data stream is considered equal in priority to a large on.

Your best option to do that is to get a asus router that supports the merlin firmware.

I would avoid using any form of QoS unless you have a actual issue. If you can find other way to say limit large downloads such as ratelimits in the download client it will be better. QoS puts quit a cpu load on the router and you have to artificially cap your connection about 10% slower than you pay for to deal with data spikes. Your connection is slow enough that it might benefit from this kind of QoS. It does not work so well for people that try to do this with a connection that is say over 200mbps, the QoS overhead quickly caps their bandwidth....besides you have a bigger issue if you consistently overload a large connection.

 

[eldridgep2]

Hi everyone, always had great success here.

I am in the UK and currently stuck using the BT SmartHub 2. I had purchased the VR2100 from TP Link, but after a couple of RMA's , these units simply wouldn't work with my connection.

The connection is perfect with the SmartHub 2 , but obviously I'd prefer to be able to split the WiFi bands and have QoS available, but this BT hub doesn't do that.

So after the TP Link mess, i'm looking for recommendations , ASUS, Draytek etc.
My max FTTC speeds are 71 down 19 up. I connect wirelessly to the router because my PC is too far from the router, but I use an Archer T9UH WiFi Adapter and get really amazing low latency connections normally, and I can game no problem.

THanks in advance.

Draytek routers are great use them all the time for smaller clients at work well the 28xx and 29xx ones not so much the smaller ones. They are very solid, support multi WAN with failover and can handle a ludicrous number of VPN connections for such a small box. They are quite pricey for home use though and if you've not played with more serious networking kit the config can take some getting used to. In my experience with Drayteks the Wi-Fi is usually the weak area, that being said I've never played with the AP-900 and above they seem to review better but the old 700's were tragic. Buy the version without wireless and stick in a decent Mesh system and you're golden. Moving off them to Ubiquiti now as they have a better all round ecosystem but for SOHO SMB market Draytek's are great,

I'm actually in the same position as you I have Plusnet operating at similar speeds over FTTC using a rebadged BT Hub. I went for a TP-Link AC2800 I got for less than £50 off eBay as I am missing the QoS functions and some of the quality of life settings that the Hub just does not offer. Didn't want to splash the cash on a Draytek but this seemed a decent middle ground. What was the issue you had with the TP-Link?