Virgin Media SuperHub

PatZ1989

PatZ1989

PatZ1989

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Has anyone else recently received one of these? Has caused some slight problems i was curious if anyone else had, up until yesterday i just had the modem and i used my own Linksys router running dd-wrt with all its lovely functionality

It seems the superhub is also a router and being that it obtains the public IP has made itself God in my network, anyone found a way to essentially turn this off so its just a hub / modem again?

Thanks
 
Legendary, i'll have to have a go at this later, isnt the second router (the one you want to use) still under the dhcp / lan of the superhub though? as in going to e.g. 86.xx.xx.xx (public IP) is still going to send you to the superhub

EDIT: actually just read through it again, thought at first that it didnt seem wise as your putting your router internet facing etc. rather then behind anything, then realised this was exactly how it would have been before

Cheers for that link, did do a search about this but it just seemed to be a lot of peopel discussing hte 50mb package
 
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Thinking of ordering this. Is the Superhub any good? I have seen some people complain about wireless signals is this still a problem? I will be connecting it up to 1 lan pc, 1 lan sonos, 2 lan ps3`s, 2 wireless laptops.
 
Its rubbish really check the forums its clear they have released a buggy all in one piece of rubbish they should stick to handing out modems. Was to be expected with it being made by netgear though. I wouldn't want it in an upgrade and i certainly wouldn't pay for it especially since you don't own even own it.
 
On the contrary to DAvE18, I think it's fine at £30.

Not owning it is a good thing, because if something breaks you get free replacements.
It might be convenient for some people to have just one box in terms of neatness and ease, rather than a separate modem / router.
Wireless signal is very strong upstairs in all rooms.
The package comes with a massive ethernet cable and a cheaper monthly tariff, meaning the £30 is clawed back to some extent anyway, not to mention the fact that the speeds are significantly better (this is very noticeable even just browsing BBC News).

I've found the superhub to be fine so far and Dave's comment about 'stick to handing out modems' is invalid anyway, as you can configure the superhub to behave exactly as a modem, and in May they're releasing a firmware patch that will add the option to the menus anyway.

The only problem I've had so far has been the fact that torrents still kill web browsing for up to fifteen minutes after I've shut uTorrent down! This is solved by using my Linksys router.
 
I personally wouldnt be happy with a router that falls over after downloading some utorrents. Wireless is known to be flaky, ips flood etc needs turned off to stop jitter on the line QOS doesn't work and it locked down to the max. And the price is pretty crap for existing customers. And the comment is not totally invalid because if your modem stops responding it can be rebooted independently where as if you only have the hub as most customers will then it also means your whole lan goes down during the reboot aswell. it's just a headache.

I can see why there wanting to do it but it just isnt the best implementation and its purely on cost there going for this idea. Its the main reason I wont be going for the 100mb when it comes out. Especially when the 50mb modem can handle 100mbps and beyond if they could be bothered.
 
Apologies for hijacking your thread...I'm on VM 50meg using the D-Link dir-615. Does any anybody know if I'm entitled to a free Superhub under that package? The gigabit ports would be very useful for me.
 
It cant be much worse then the current router I have (Linksys WRT54GS).
Between that and the SA cable modem I have they lock up about once per day requiring a reboot.

Plus the fact that the Superhub has 'N' wireless and gigabit ethernet so file transfers between machines should be faster through it too. Currently I can download from the net as quick as I can send files between machines :(

I was looking at buying a new router last month but at ~£80 for a reasonable gigabit and 'N' router I thought i'd opt for the £30 to virgin, and get a 10mb increase on my downloads and decreased monthly bills to boot.

Hopefully the Superhub isn't as bad as people make it out to be!
 
DAvE18 said:
And the comment is not totally invalid because if your modem stops responding it can be rebooted independently where as if you only have the hub as most customers will then it also means your whole lan goes down during the reboot aswell.
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Yes it was totally invalid and your comments make no sense. If a customer is annoyed that rebooting the hub takes out their whole LAN, they just use their router as I said.

If they never had their own router to begin with, then under your method they'd have been forced to buy one for at least £30 anyway.

DAvE18 said:
I personally wouldnt be happy with a router that falls over after downloading some utorrents.
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Neither would I but as I've already explained, you don't have to use it as a router. 90% of people will be perfectly happy with this set up. All their wireless devices work nice and quickly in a neat one box solution.

For advanced / technical users the hub is inadequate, but they all have separate routers anyway.

DAvE18 said:
I can see why there wanting to do it but it just isnt the best implementation and its purely on cost there going for this idea.
Click to expand...

Shocker as company tries to save costs!

Personally I'm going to look into running the superhub for wireless clients in tandem with the Linksys WRT54GL for wired clients. Not sure whether or not this is possible.
 
the WRT54xx series was generally pretty awesome. I've got the WRT54GL which I believe is similar to the GS but with a bit more RAM in it. I have Tomato on it (custom firmware) and it was brilliant, very stable, fast, customizable etc.

Annoyingly all of that has gone out the window now the superhub is involved :( Wish VM would hurry up with the modem only firmware update for it.

also for the record, mine hasn't fallen over at all since I've used it even after downloading some large files. It's crappy for advanced users, the firmware is generally slow and/or buggy but the hardware isn't actually that bad
 
Robbie G said:
Personally I'm going to look into running the superhub for wireless clients in tandem with the Linksys WRT54GL for wired clients. Not sure whether or not this is possible.
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If your using the DMZ hack then probably not unless you basically have 2 networks. Wireless and DHCP on the superhub as one, then everything else wired on the 54GL as another
 
Robbie G said:
No it hasn't.
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care to elaborate a bit more?

Edit: I assume you're replying to me stating that the awesome functionality of Tomato has gone out the window? I'm talking from my experience so far with the superhub. I don't know if you've read the other thread but I've had issues accessing various things from outside the network, so as a quick fix i've just offloaded most of the stuff I had setup in Tomato on the superhub and my 54GL in an attempt to get things working as they were but it's still not 100%. so now my 54GL is basically unused :(
 
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cokecan72 said:
If your using the DMZ hack then probably not unless you basically have 2 networks. Wireless and DHCP on the superhub as one, then everything else wired on the 54GL as another
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That's the plan.

cokecan72 said:
care to elaborate a bit more?

Edit: I assume you're replying to me stating that the awesome functionality of Tomato has gone out the window? I'm talking from my experience so far with the superhub. I don't know if you've read the other thread but I've had issues accessing various things from outside the network, so as a quick fix i've just offloaded most of the stuff I had setup in Tomato on the superhub and my 54GL in an attempt to get things working as they were but it's still not 100%. so now my 54GL is basically unused :(
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Sorry, I was just off looking for the workaround...what I meant was that you can just use your WRT as a router and the superhub as a modem, but then you seem to know that already given your comment 'If your using the DMZ hack', so I don't really understand why your comment 'Annoyingly all of that has gone out the window now the superhub is involved' holds true :).

You are saying that you've followed the workaround guideliness but the 54GL's functionality is still limited / crippled somewhat?
 
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the 54GL's functionality from an internal LAN point of view was great. it all worked as before from what I could see, the issue came from when I wanted to access it from the WAN (i.e. from work).

I have a DNS forwarder setup on my domain to point to the WAN IP (basically recreating dyndns or no-ip.org type service but with my own domain). I used this to connect to the remote config page of Tomato so I could use the WOL feature and wake up machines in my network with static ARP entries. I also used it to point to my subsonic music streaming service and RDP.

No matter what I tried, I couldnt connect to either of these things using my domain forwarder or the new WAN ip that the superhub has. so to remedy the issue I moved everything onto the superhub and connected the 54GL as switch with the hopes of connecting to it's config page that way (this would be with the internal config page address rather than the external one) so I could still access the WOL page. Unfortunately this still doesn't work.

So my comment was more aimed at my situation in that currently the 54GL is connected but has no use now i've moved all my port forwarding rules etc over to the superhub and still can't access the config page of the 54GL :)
 
My personal opinion on the Superhub is that it will always be knocked down as per any other hardware provided by an ISP. "Oh it can't do this" and "oh but it can't run this like my fully customised DD-WRT can". Yeah, that's because they are an ISP and are attempting to provide a one size fits all router at as cheap a price as possible. Doesn't matter how good it is there are always going to be people that complain for the sake of complaining. A lot of people will run their own routers "just because" to give them an added sense of power when in reality, there is no shame what so ever in using the new super hub.
I speak from experience of always running my own router and generally giving away any freebies on upgrades. I used to run Tomato on a WRT54GL and yes it stayed up for weeks, was very stable, easily customizable and did everything I needed, but this was back in the day when provided routers by VM were not very stable and lacked features.

Fast forward to now. I got given a free superhub when my old modem broke the other month. The superhub does everything I require from a router and provides an upgrade to my LAN with an integrated gigabit switch. I'd like to see you buy a decent router with integrated gig switch for £30. You can't. I got this free anyway due to an issue with my old modem like I say.
The management pages aren't customizable no, and no they aren't so pretty, and no it doesn't allow bandwitdth monitoring and the likes, but frankly I configure my routers once and then they get stashed as far out of the way as possible. Frankly if I never hear from it again I consider that a result. I have had my router running 24/7 for weeks with no issues. Torrents do NOT cause issues with net slow down, downloads run fine, things get shared fine, transfers are fast via giga. Yes there is a minor bug where you need to turn IP flood detection off until a firmware fix is out, but this may have already been addressed and isn't really an issue. I sold all my old routers and now have one less power cable, one less item taking up space, less power and heat usage around my gear and everything works the same as it did.

I'm just trying to offer an alternative opinion. I used to be in the firm camp of "well it's more VM tat". But sometimes you need to applaud when a suitable product comes out. This all in one solution in my opinion does a fine job, and whilst it may not have some advanced features I think the majority of VM customers it will obviously cater for, and even many of the more tech savy enthusiasts like myself that run more involved home lans. If you currently rely heavily on highly advanced and custom features like VPN/QOS stuff then obviously this would be a substantial downgrade, but for a lot of pepople like myself that are just happy for it to sit there working, we are happy with the superhub for our needs.
 
cokecan72 said:
So my comment was more aimed at my situation in that currently the 54GL is connected but has no use now i've moved all my port forwarding rules etc over to the superhub and still can't access the config page of the 54GL :)
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I see...well that sucks as WOL is something I want to implement for various reasons, not least of which being able to switch the PC upstairs on from my phone, so that the HTPC downstairs can access its share.

Regarding port forwarding, I tried last night to get the same port forwarded to two different local IP addresses but I got a duplication error message. Did you encounter this / do you happen to know what's going on?

jaybee said:
Fast forward to now. I got given a free superhub when my old modem broke the other month.
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Curses, should have thought of that one. Would have saved me £30 :p.
 
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jaybee said:
...A good balanced post...
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There are always going to be 3 camps in these situations though. I totally agree with you that for the large majority of VM's user base the superhub will be perfect, it'll do the job nicely and is a good all in one solution. At the end of the day they can't please everyone so they have to go with the majority.

As you have rightfully said there are always a minority of people who do require additional functionality that just isn't there in the superhub (camp 2)

And as always, the people who do not like change :) (camp 3). I'll be honest and I'm partly in this camp because I like the way my network worked before the superhub has got in the way of my day to day running of it. however until I can find a solution to my above issue i'm going to say i'm partly in camp 2 also lol (I believe what I'm trying to do is possible as Khaaan suggested he does something similar and that works)

Robbie G said:
Regarding port forwarding, I tried last night to get the same port forwarded to two different local IP addresses but I got a duplication error message. Did you encounter this / do you happen to know what's going on?.
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I didn't have any issues with port forwarding, to be honest I didn't change anything at all on 54GL in that respect. the superhub didn't have any port forwarding rules setup though I did disable upnp which may have automatically mapped out a port if something requested it. As far as i'm aware the DMZ will just allow all inbound connections in including which ever port it's pointed at which confuses me even more as to why I'm experiencing the issues I am.

WOL is very useful! :) Tomato was the first way of doing it I found that worked consistently which is why I started using it as heavily as I did. Wake PC up, RDP to it, Do what ever I needed to do, put PC to sleep again and jobs good. You could basically wake anything up in your network from any device that had an internet conenction and a net browser
 
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jaybee said:
If you currently rely heavily on highly advanced and custom features like VPN/QOS stuff then obviously this would be a substantial downgrade, but for a lot of pepople like myself that are just happy for it to sit there working, we are happy with the superhub for our needs.
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You make some good points and I want to be happy with this unit, as it's a much more compact solution as you mention.

However I had QoS set up on my WRT54GL so that torrents didn't kill browsing. This and WOL are the two main reasons I want to use my router again. Maybe I need to revisit the settings as regards torrents crashing the browser and figure out some other way to implement WOL.
 
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