I had BT's line and Broadband services out of habit for years. Too lazy to look around I tolerated extremely poor service on the phone both from the staff in India and the technical staff based here. The router had to be re-started in excess of 10 times a day, and would still drop off after that. I had two replacements within the year but finally had enough when the idiot on the phone told me he would have to put me through to someone else who could explain it was machine that was the problem (despite me telling him I was picking up everyone elses routers on my street on all of them...). I was also told that sending an engineer out to me would cost approx £300, or I could find someone in the area who could repair any damaged wiring. There wasn't any!!!! Despite writing to Iain Livingstone (Group Head of BT) and actually getting a reponse from him (he was very helpful) and assuring me the problems would be resolved by a named individual) they weren't. So every hour on the hour I emailed him until they were. I am very technically aware due to the nature of what I do for a living, but this shouldn't matter. However, I finally decided to come out of my comfort zone and moved to Virgin Media. The TV service is excellent (And allowed me to get rid of Sky which was great but far too expensive) and the broadband service is always working. I also had them run a cable to my property to provide me with their phone service aswell.

I've had 2 of these, Type A and Type B (the most recent) In my home I wanted the network to allow data sharing from a common source, and also to allow media streaming to compatible devices. Point to note is that BT also sell and promote other brands, such as Netgear.

I have a Netgear NAS, which connects to the router, and should allow data sharing with other devices on the LAN. PC can access my NAS fine, however the media streaming aspect is killed by the BT hub. So for example, I cannot stream music or movies to my hi-fi and TV via my Xbox. Strange as they are all supposed to be UPnP/DLNA compatible. I sought help from BT to eventually be told by a reasonably rude person that there was an incompatibility. I pointed out that BT advertise the brands and product families I was having problems with and asked to be shown a list of compatible/non-compatible kit. As expected no-one could do that for me either. The hub had also dropped connections, and as for the phone, sometimes it would not allow me to call the numbers I wanted - just a dead line.

I've now dumped the BT hub in favour of a Netgear model. It works as it should with minimal messing around. I can now share my data and media as I want to. I'm glad to see the back of that black box, but remain disappointed and frustrated at BT's arrogant and unhelpful approach to customer service. BT need to be reminded they don't have a monopoly and should drop the attitude. BTW a search for issues with this hub, suggests they are many, yet BT choose to stick their head in the sand instead. Nice.