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BT Home Hub 3 ADSL Wi-Fi router

End of the line for signal box failure?

Review Everything is wireless these days, it seems. It’s convenient, effective and liberating not to be tied down to a laptop or whatever with wires. But if you find your Wi-Fi behaves erratically, dropping connections or stuttering to a stop when you’re streaming video, say, you’ll know it’s not always plain sailing. And then when you’re on the phone complaining to customer services it all seems to be working just fine again.

BT Home Hub 3

BT's Home Hub 3: turn on, tune in... no drop out

BT’s latest router has Smart Wireless which aims to take the stuttering and guesswork away. When you set up any router it automatically picks the clearest frequency. Trouble is, it’s stuck with it. So if something else pops up that isn’t Wi-Fi friendly, it can cause problems.

Video senders, those little doohickeys that transfer Strictly... from the living room TV to the bedroom set, so Gran can listen with the sound at maximum, can easily get in the way of Wi-Fi. Smart Wireless means the Home Hub 3 can dynamically change what frequency it’s on if it spots trouble. Other routers don’t do this automatically.

That’s one of the stand-out features of the BT machine which, like earlier Home Hubs, is painfully simple to set up. It has a neat detail when it comes to passwords, too.

You know when a friend comes round and wants to use your Wi-Fi? Searching for the password means remembering where you put that Post-It note you scribbled it on last time or crawling round the back of the router to see where it’s printed.

BT Home Hub 3

Password key fob

The Home Hub 3 has a plastic fob with the password on that slides out under your thumb easily and is so curiously shaped that you’ll remember it must pop back into the machine when you’ve reacquainted yourself with the code.

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