[zekeisaszekedoes]

<rhetoric>

Again I can understand why VM have gone the Super Hub route, and can understand that looking forward for most users who don't need a bunch of in depth options it could be a good idea.

Right now though, as it stands, the product is in no way ready for that use. Worse still, it limits the "early adopters" who stereotypically are fairly technically adept and have to put up with obvious flaws and stupid bugs.

I think the consensus among some is that regardless of what kind of user you are, you might well run into troubles as you start to put heavier usage on your network. The trends of the past few years suggest everyone is slowly using more and more bandwidth, so what passes as a "light" internet use now with streaming video and some downloads would be much greater than a light user five years ago who almost never downloaded a thing and didn't even have a PC capable of streaming QVGA video. Even basing things on the lowest common denominator you can see an upward curve as people en masse become ever more reliant on the internet.

If the Super Hub is to last several years as I would guess VM are hedging, it's going to need to be a hell of a lot better than it is now. The bridge mode should already be present, we shouldn't have to moan to get it or downgrade to previous modems. If VM wants to keep both regular and more technical users happy, which in my opinion the Super Hub cannot do right now, it needs serious work.

VM are the best ISP in the UK and they still can't get it right, while Korea and similar countries sail by us with their higher speeds (out there, 50-100Mb is seen as average) and superior service. They're moving up to Gigabit this year for goodness sake! We're lagging behind because of a poor modem/router solution. And of course VM can get away with it because they have a monopoly on broadband, kind of how BT had a monopoly on analogue phone line services fifteen or so years ago.

I'm not sure if any of this is coherent, I'm just thinking out loud. I know the fiber optic network can give excellent performance because when I stay away from the Super Hub and use other equipment the results are fast and stable. Surely better to change it now than before thousands more users migrate to it and moan far louder and longer and more expensively than me and a handful of other dissenters do.

</rhetoric>