Gadget: BT Home Hub
The latest IP telephone service from BT essentially is a wireless broadband router – it connects to the phone line and a PC, as well as providing a wireless network for the home.
From: www.bt.com
Price: From £8.95 pm in a package
The BT Home Hub package is a good one for people that like to use the phone. The quality of the service is good, the kit looks quite sexy, but the main point is that with this complete Broadband package, you get free evening and weekend calls on the VOIP phone, making it really worth while.
But taking a look at the kit itself, having an all in one hub is a good idea, and the product itself follows the Apple iPod/white trend, offering a minimalistic but nicely designed hub that won’t look out of place around the house.
It does seem a bit cumbersome in that it’s adding yet another headset to the house, and so it will be nicer when you can simply have one phone for all purposes, however the phone itself is sleek and sexy with its colour screen and design, so at least there aren’t any complaints on the looks side of things.
Essentially the Hub is a wireless broadband router – it connects to the phone line and a PC, as well as providing a wireless network for the home, and getting the actual phone is an optional extra. For the moment, that's all this offers, however in the future it will be used to connect to BT’s Vision internet television service, plus the BT Fusion mobile and home phone can also link up with the Home Hub.
Hardware-wise, it's an 802.11g Wifi router with a built-in firewall and has a couple of free network ports to connect other devices, plus a dedicated VoIP socket for your phone if you choose to use it.
The problem with these products is that they can get frustrating to set up, but this wasn’t the case with the Hub. There were very simple instructions to follow, and not much work needed in order to get it up and working, and so it’ll be a good way to get some of the non IT-literate people to have the latest technologies in their homes, hassle-free.
The quality of the phone service is also very good, and so it’ll make people more interested in what VoiP services can offer. All in all, the Hub concept is a good one, but it does have a few holes. It looks nice and works well, but although in theory its there to be a ‘hub’ you will find yourself using a number of other products; landline for incoming calls, Skype for cheap/free calls sometimes, and of course a TV package as Vision is not yet set up.
If you are already a BT subscriber then this is well worth looking into, however if you aren’t, and already find that you have all you need elsewhere, it might be worth waiting until convergence catches up a little, and the Hub represents a better ‘all in one’ deal…
Reviewer: Assistant editor, Keri Allan
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