Using older router for full fibre

[#1]

Hi. Engineer came today and installed full fibre broadband, but due to the Royal Mail strike there is no sign of the new Plusnet 2 hub coming anytime soon. The old fibre broadband seems to be switched of and is no longer available. I have last Plusnet router and an original BT Smart Hub (the first version not the second version). The Openreach engineer suggested that the BT Smart Hub 1 could be used by using an ethernet cable and converting Port 4 to a red port. He wasn't able to figure out how to do it though. Would be grateful of any help while waiting for the arrival of the new router.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

It should work if you plug an ethernet cable into the WAN port of the Hub One then the other end into the ONT.

[#3]

Thank you for such a quick reply Gandalf. The Openreach engineer told me that the Plusnet hub i already had wouldn't work. Just set it up as you described and it does indeed work. Much appreciated.

[#4]

@Matt68 the only proviso with using the Hub 1 is that, if you've got one of the higher speed packages, you will find that your upstream speed will be limited to about 30Mb. 

[#5]

Thank you MisterW, good to know. We're currently getting 30Mb with the old router and that's more than enough for us while waiting for the new router.

[#6]

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@Matt68 wrote:
The Openreach engineer suggested that the BT Smart Hub 1 could be used by using an ethernet cable and converting Port 4 to a red port. He wasn't able to figure out how to do it though. Would be grateful of any help while waiting for the arrival of the new router.

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For the record, the ‘engineer’ was wrong.

I believe that the Smarthub 2 can be configured this way but there were two versions of the original Smarthub. The FTTP version was called something like Ultrafast and has a permanent WAN port like the Plusnet Hub 2