Friday, August 15, 2014

Changing the router (again)

Back in May I went through the hell of retiring my BT Home Hub in favour of a spare one (v.2) which I had lying around. I wrote about the pain here. That replacement router was not a success. What is it with BT Home Hubs? Unstable, dropping the broadband line, refusing to allocate IP addresses ... .

I bought a Netgear N300 wireless ADSL+ Modem Router (DGN2200v4) on Tuesday and installed it yesterday. Good day - it was chucking it down with rain, which reliably knocks over the DSL line. The Netgear wizard was not so smart either, believing for some reason I was connecting to a cable modem. I tried to manually configure the Internet connection but to no avail. After some hours of messing around I re-engaged the wizard (via the "Advanced" pane) and this time everything worked. I remembered that the Sky Box WiFi connector needed to be re-homed; only later did I recall the wireless printer and my Kindle.

I may pay a price for ditching the Home Hub. I no longer provide the BT FON function and will most likely be shut out of using other people's BT WiFi when out and about. There again, BT will probably not notice.