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Plusnet Fibre Router

shermans
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Registered: ‎07-09-2007

Plusnet Fibre Router

I currently use a BT HomeHub 5A router with my current standard broadband service from Plusnet, but I am upgrading to Fibre as it has just come to our village.  The sales pitch from Plusnet was that the new Plusnet Fibre router will be much faster with a 25 meter range.  As I have mentioned often on this forum, I live in an old cottage with extremely thick, dense chalk walls (fantastic insulation !) which was formerly three small attached cottages, now knocked into one.  The problem is that the house is therefore long and thin, and the shared walls of the original cottages are double thickness, four to five feet thick, and even more where there are large inglenooks.  One chimney is even wide enough upstairs for me to have knocked a hole in it for a door and installed a toilet and shower inside the chimney.  WiFi is therefore difficult, and I use three WiFi routers connected by ethernet cables to get coverage all over the house.  It works well.

My question is whether this new Plusnet Fibre router is going to be better than the existing BT HomeHub 5A master router and ethernet slave routers.  Does anyone have any experience please ?

5 REPLIES 5
Baldrick1
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Re: Plusnet Fibre Router

Ho Hum! The Plusnet Hub 1 is a rebadged BT HH5A.

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Alex
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Re: Plusnet Fibre Router

I doubt it.

As far as I know, the HubOne is the same hardware as the BT Homehub 5A with a different appearance and PlusNet branded firmware.

If wireless is bad you could look at getting some wireless extenders (I think I paid £40 for mine from Argos), Home Plugs or if you want to be really adventurous get Ethernet sockets installed at home.

P.S. The last one was a joke Smiley, but look into wireless extenders or Home Plugs.

shermans
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Re: Plusnet Fibre Router

Thanks for the replies.  So if I understand correctly, there is no need to change the BT HomeHub 5A which works well with my ethernet network into which the slave WiFi routers are plugged.  Have I understood that correctly ?  I would rather leave well enough alone, better the devil you know and any other appropriate clichées !  I assume that I will be issued with a new Plusnet Fibre username and password which I would then have to change in the BT HomeHub 5A router as presumably it will not be the same as the old steam broadband username.

I can say for sure that the BT HomeHub 5A had only marginally more WiFi range (at least in my house) than the Plusnet Thompson or Zero routers.  So if the new Fibre router from Plusnet is no better than the BT HomeHub 5A I can really see no point in changing it.

But one other thing concerns me.  I have left the BT HomeHub 5A set to 2.5 Ghz only, because I read somewhere that 5 Ghz reduced the range (but increased the speed).  Now that I am changing to Fibre, can I still use 2.5 Ghz or MUST I change to 5 Ghz ?

As always, thanks for the help.

Mustrum
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Registered: ‎13-08-2015

Re: Plusnet Fibre Router

It would be worth getting the Hub1 in case the HH5 goes faulty one day.

You should not have a new username or password for your router.

Rather than turn off the 5Ghz setting, I just added a 5 to the end of the SSID, and made sure it does not sync with the 2.4, that way if you have a device that can see and use the 5Ghz channels they might run a bit quicker.

Alex
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Registered: ‎05-04-2007

Re: Plusnet Fibre Router

Well personally when we got Fibre, the Hub One (aka the Homehub 5A) had much better wireless coverage than the PlusNet Thomson router we had before. Used to have an extender upstairs, but I disconnected it as we didn't need it anymore.

We had a skip in and I just chucked it in there. No use to myself or parents now we're on Fibre. Old tech which is obsolete and if you tried to flog it on Ebay I think after the seller costs and postage, you wouldn't make a profit Tongue