Quote:
Originally Posted by davidthornton
What has made you assume that Virgin Media begun designing the Superhub right after the VMNG300 was released with the 50Mbit product? They might have started thinking about it well before then, or a long time after.  The two projects aren't connected. |
Fair point. I'm merely remarking that given a maximum time frame of 18 months, the woeful superhub is the best VM (in cahoots with Netgear) have been able to manage. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the superhub was designed/built/marketed in about 3 months, because it certainly has all the finesse of a device in extended beta (i.e. completely unfinished before release, like Windows Vista).
Quote:
Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq
It doesn't "fix" the fact that some people just don't want it.
You can fix a knife all you want but if all I want is a fork, you can damn well keep it.
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...and doesn't qas have a nice way of cutting straight to the quick?
Quote:
Originally Posted by kenoliver
Blue and green flashing from the side and the same with a grid pattern from the top  |
Basically you want to hide the superhub away in a cupboard because of the lights, yeah? I know I did when I had it running. The lights gleam out the front and spill out from all the air vents too. Those LEDs aren't only too bright, but because the case has vents on it will light up any room you put it in.
Let's fact it, the superhub is terrible from both an aesthetic and technical performance aspect. It's an offense, lacklustre piece of junk masquerading as flagship hardware.
Quote:
Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq
It's an all Broadcom solution built around a Broadcom BCM3380 SoC (which some already knew) - it's a fairly common and reasonably stable (but outdated) SoC found in a few Cisco CPE's as well so by the looks of it most of the problems are firmware related, not crappy hardware.
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No surprise there. I'm not the most technically adept but my experience with Broadcom-based hardware had been positive until the superhub came along. It's amazing how poor firmware can cripple a reasonable hardware solution; the Broadcom based Linksys WRT54GS v2.1 I have (100Mbps/54Mbps G for everyone else, remember) can still offer better performance despite older hardware.
Quote:
Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq
On another note the wireless comes as a seperate mini-pci card (of the type commonly found in laptops) which makes it bigger, more complex, more expensive, and more power consuming that it needs to be, though it does let VM upgrade the wireless independantly without needing a new MB for the SH.
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Jesus. My six-year-old Dell D810 sports a Mini-PCI. Difference is, the Atheros-based TP-Link 300Mbps wireless N device I have shoehorned in there has nice, stable drivers able to handle about 12.5MB/s sustained transfers (limited by old single-core CPU, often) on a good N router. Wish I could say the same about the superhub at even HALF that speed.
Poor design on a supposedly "flagship" device. I mean, this kind of tech was dated when my laptop was released in 2005, so now it just looks like a joke.
I suppose the real question is, who sweet-talked VM into believing this was a good solution? Even putting aside that non-integrated mini-PCI solutions are more expensive to mass-manufacture (a good reason why the Linksys WRT54G v1.0 had mini-PCI and pretty much all the successors had it integrated on the mobo.)