Why does my BT Smart Hub keep disconnecting?

We’re not sure. And neither, more worryingly, is BT.

I recently signed a new two-year deal with BT Broadband, and as part of the deal I negotiated that they would send me a new Smart Hub 6, having read plenty of good reviews of the router.

All was well for the first few days. The switchover was dead simple, the router was hitting my expected line speeds, and the dead spots in my house were a little less deader (my grammar checker really doesn’t like that word). Then things went south…

On day four, the router suddenly lost its internet connection and for the next hour was locked in an endless reboot cycle. BT’s support desk was about as much help as the norovirus, almost immediately declaring they’d need to send out an engineer – except one couldn’t be roused for five days. So I plugged my old Home Hub 4 back in and, hey presto, the connection was back to normal.

Another chat with BT’s sheepish call centre ensued, after which they agreed to send out a replacement Smart Hub. This one lasted roughly 15 hours before it too kept dropping the connection and rebooting. This one would re-establish an internet connection, but the regular dropouts were annoying, to say the least. This time the BT support desk admitted that “many people” were having problems with the new Smart Hub, and it seems they weren’t kidding.

Scan through the BT support forums, and you’ll find plenty of people complaining about the BT Smart Hub constantly dropping connections (such as here on the ThinkBroadband forums).

One post from April claims a BT support bod told a customer: “BT are now no longer supplying Smart Hubs due to the large number of issues being reported.” Except it seems they still are. To me, for one. I’ve now got a small collection of them.

I’ve asked BT’s press office to comment on the problems with the Smart Hub, but like the router itself, they’ve been largely unresponsive for the past 24 hours. I’ll update this piece as soon as I hear anything from them.

In the meantime, if BT offer you an “upgrade” to the Smart Hub 6, you might want to politely decline.

(P.S. BT’s press image library no longer has a shot of the Smart Hub. Odd that…)

Additional explainers you might be interested in

• How do you turn off Wi-Fi on a Virgin Media router?
• What do the lights on a Vodafone router mean?