BT Home Hub 4: Hands-on pictures and video UPDATED

BT’s Home Hub 4 is available to BT Broadband customers right now and is the most advanced wireless router from BT yet.

Like many cutting-edge wireless routers on the market today it’s a dual band device. This means it transmits two separate WiFi signals, one on the 2.4GHz band and one on the 5GHz band. In layman’s terms this basically means you get a better WiFi signal that’s not as plagued by interference.

Common household devices like microwaves and baby monitors transmit on the 2.4GHz frequency meaning your home WiFi network is likely to be congested.

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Read Recombu Digital’s guides to Setting up a Wireless Home Network and What is a Router?This is why dual band routers are so desirable, as they transmit signals on the less busy 5GHz band too. This gives you a better experience when connecting to the Home Hub 4 on your phones, tablets and laptops.

The Home Hub 4 also features BT’s Smart Wireless technology which automatically selects the least busy channel for your devices and dynamically alternates to accommodate and distribute new wireless signals. BT says that up to 64 separate wireless connections can happily coexist on the Hub 4, so this should suffice for when everyone starts coming home and hopping on the WiFi.

In this video, David McDonald, general manager for consumer broadband for BT takes us through the finer points of the Home Hub 4 and why BT customers should consider getting one.

The BT Home Hub 4 is bundled free with all BT Broadband Unlimited packages. The exception of the entry-level BT Broadband 16Mbps service comes with the older BT Home Hub 3, but customers can upgrade for a one-off £35 fee.

BT Home Hub 4: What’s in the box?

That’s how it all works in a nutshell. But what do you get in the box when your Home Hub 4 slides through your letter box? You get:

BT Home Hub 4
BT Infinity WAN cable
Ethernet cable
Dual band wireless USB dongle

The BT Infinity WAN cable (the one with the red ends) is what you use to connect the Home Hub 4 to the white Openreach VDSL modem. This will be set up in your home by an Openreach engineer.

There’s one extra Ethernet cable supplied if for any wired connections to the Home Hub 4 you might need to make.

The wireless USB dongle is designed to work with Windows PCs that don’t have a built-in WiFi. This is a straightforward plug and play type device but BT says that you shouldn’t plug this in or attempt to use it until you’ve got your Home Hub 4 up and running. Click on the thumbnails below to enlarge.