Superhub : can we really write it off?

[markie1966]

Originally Posted by Tuvoc

No offense.. but that is ridiculous. Nothing is perfect. I'm sure if I google your 655 I'll find at least one person for whom it is not working properly. Must be rubbish then.

my point was that the fact there are hubs out there that are obviously CRAP at what they were supposed to do ...but rushed out without proper testing.... means they shouldnt have released the hub until the software was ready
would u buy a car and wait 6 months before u got the steering wheel?

[Peter_]

Originally Posted by markie1966

no offense....but one hub not working properly is one too many

I take by that rather silly comment that you have very little idea about what you are talking about, the are well over half a million Superhubs in use throughout the country and no manufacturer anywhere in the world would ever be so naive as to state none of their devices will ever develop a fault or even have a fault when delivered.

Even the older standard modems develop faults or were sometimes faulty upon delivery or install and the same can be said for the different makes and models of routers we supplied.

So do please justify that rather silly statement above because you have shot yourself in the foot by posting it.

---------- Post added at 12:50 ---------- Previous post was at 12:48 ----------

Originally Posted by Tuvoc

All Virgin Media staff members' Superhubs work just fine

It is hard to know the extent of the problem. The postings on forums are a tiny minority of users, but a lot of people just rely on phone support so we need to add those in. But even so, what we might be seeing is 1% having problems with a silent 99% majority quite happy with theirs.

Initially my Superhub took 6/7 hours to activate but since then it has been rock solid, we get them in exactly the same way as anyone else via courier and I even had to pay the £30 upgrade fee.

Anyone thinking that they can use a few threads and posts on various forums as proof that every device is inherently faulty is living in cloud cuckoo land, this is a general comment and not specific to the person being quoted above.

[Sirius]

Mine is now in modem mode and bloody well staying that way. I have not the time or inclination today to list why.

All i will say is there is now a pfsense router sat on the connection.

http://www.pfsense.org/

[Chrysalis]

Masque it works both ways and this has been gone round in circles before on here.

I agree with the one fault too many comment, any hardware supplier should always strive for 0 reported problems. I have never had a router company tell me a bug I reported is not important because I am the only one to report the fault. Billion even made me some personal custom firmwares to resolve issues I had with one of its routers. Its a very bad idea for VM to apply their fault management to hardware where if its below a cerian % of customers it dont matter.

The posts on VMs forums are probably a fraction of what is going on in the call centres, so its a reasonable assumption to make if one sees 1000 complaints on the forums you could multiply that by a lot to get a total complaints figure. eg. by 100 which would make 100k complaints.100k out of 500k issued units? hmm not good fault rate. That will be why modem mode was developed and VM at one point were going to do a 2nd superhub.

My guess is a lot of phone reports get misdiagnosed so the figures are massaged, someone may call in with dropping wireless, the rep logs in remotely changes the channel and it improves a bit so gets logged as customer configuration issue when its really a hardware flaw.

the issue where the 2nd superhub manufacturer was been worked on, this was claimed by staff here this was preplanned before the netgear device launched, yet mysteriously when modem mode dropped complaints significanty the 2nd device has been canned.

the truth for me is that the superhub has faults inherint in its design, these faults either dont always surface or dont always get noticed and hence some posters saying theres works fine.

[Tuvoc]

OK, yes it seems that the initial firmware was buggy and could have been more throughly tested. Seems the TIVO box is suffering similar issues actually. Wireless is problematic at the best of times due to interference, crowded channels, type of house etc. At least the wireless from my Virgin supplied Netgear wireless router has worked perfectly the last 3 years :-) All the Netgear stuff I've had over the years has been perfect

[Chrysalis]

multi function tv set top boxes seem problematic for tv companies for some reason, I expect most likely because they trying to build them on the cheap all the time. My VM STB is fine but of course its the standard device, no recording.

[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by kwikbreaks

It doesn't matter how well yours works - on the VM community board Superhub complaints are neck and neck with congestion for the most common cause of problems.

I'm no fan of the SH in router mode, but I'll bet that a fair number of SH complaints are actually congestion related.

That said, I've not failed to notice that on either forum Masque/Peter_ doesn't acknwledge (avoids acknowledging) that the wretched device is unstable and weak on wireless.

[kwikbreaks]

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

I'm no fan of the SH in router mode, but I'll bet that a fair number of SH complaints are actually congestion related.

Probably but probably no more than the number of "slow broadband" complaints which are in fact caused by the poor WiFi performance of the Superhub.

[roughbeast]

Originally Posted by Tuvoc

OK, yes it seems that the initial firmware was buggy and could have been more throughly tested. Seems the TIVO box is suffering similar issues actually.....

TIVO? Problems? Well, not here.

That is the point isn't it? A small minority are having problems with the SHUB in router mode and a few are having problems with TIVO. Thing is, most aren't and my TIVO is great..

For me it made sense to continue using my WNDR37000 as my router, because it works faultlessly and is superior to the SHUB router anyway. If I still had a VM netgear 2000 I may well have gone with the SHUB and would probably have been over the moon. However I came to this forum. A seed of doubt was sown, so I stuck with what I knew worked.

[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by Masque

..........Anyone thinking that they can use a few threads and posts on various forums as proof that every device is inherently faulty is living in cloud cuckoo land, this is a general comment and not specific to the person being quoted above.

True - but the firmware history of that wretched device proves that every issued SH at the time was inherently (particularly inherently) faulty.

What interests me is whether or not the Huawei SH displays similar faults. The Netgear implementation failed due to firmware errors in handling VM's spec.

Maybe Huawei have written their firmware better. Or are we to suffer the Netgear written firmware loaded onto the Huawei manufactured device? I don't think the latter but nothing would surprise me now.

[Chrysalis]

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

True - but the firmware history of that wretched device proves that every issued SH at the time was inherently (particularly inherently) faulty.

What interests me is whether or not the Huawei SH displays similar faults. The Netgear implementation failed due to firmware errors in handling VM's spec.

Maybe Huawei have written their firmware better. Or are we to suffer the Netgear written firmware loaded onto the Huawei manufactured device? I don't think the latter but nothing would surprise me now.

I think but not 100% sure the Huawei version is now scrapped.

[Sephiroth]

What's the stroy behind that, Chrys?

[jb66]

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

I think but not 100% sure the Huawei version is now scrapped.

Gutted, maybe there getting a proper company like Cisco

[baz135]

After having tried 3 Super Hubs after upgrading to 30Mbps and spending hours on the phone talking to Customer Support and numerous VM engineer visits. VM eventually changed my third Hub with a modem and Dlink Router never looked back since. So as far as I am concerned the Super Hub is a bag of pooh and would not recommend one to any one.

[Peter_]

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

I'm no fan of the SH in router mode, but I'll bet that a fair number of SH complaints are actually congestion related.

That said, I've not failed to notice that on either forum Masque/Peter_ doesn't acknwledge (avoids acknowledging) that the wretched device is unstable and weak on wireless.

I have said many times that when my Superhub was in normal router mode my devices preferred its connection as I still had my Edimax router connected albeit as an Access Point, I was a triallist for Modem Mode and have kept it as such.

Sorry it just continues to work and I have had this device since February.