Orange Wireless Router vs BT HomeHub

luckwudaveit

Its coming up to renewal time for my broadband and calls deal. Last year I realised I was overpaying with BT and asked for a MAC and was given a reasonable deal of £26.60/mth for line rental, anytime calls and unlimited BB, so I stayed with them.

I have now seen Orange's deal and as I am an Orange mobile customer, I can get line rental, anytime calls and unlimited BB for £22.75 (+ £50 Sainsburys vouchers). This effectively is a saving of over £100 against BT.

What worries me is losing the BT HomeHub as it has been faultless and covers the whole house without any problems. If I go to Orange, is their wireless router any good? Does anyone have any experience of them? (If its useful, the router will go in the front bedroom of a 1960's 3 bed semi). Thanks in advance for any advice.

cgk1

The orange livebox is junk.

luckwudaveit

Hmm, thanks. I've also been looking at the Sky deal. What is their router like? (My exchangeis 3.5km away and is Sky LLU enabled: http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/WSHAM

patman99

You don't have to use the kit supplied by the ISP. You can buy your own.
If you know which BT Homehub you have, you should be able to flash it with OEM firmware and use it with any ISP you want. I did this with a type 2 HH and used it with Demon for a while.

Sky use rebadged Netgear kit (as do Orange).

luckwudaveit

patman99 wrote: »

You don't have to use the kit supplied by the ISP. You can buy your own.
If you know which BT Homehub you have, you should be able to flash it with OEM firmware and use it with any ISP you want. I did this with a type 2 HH and used it with Demon for a while.

Interesting, I will look into this, thanks.

macman

Both are junk...
Don't decide your ISP based on which router they supply, you can get a perfectly good Netgear or similar on eBay for a tenner.
Orange of course won't support it, but given their support is useless anyway, that doesn't actually matter.
You are aware that Orange is one of the lowest rated ISP's around? Not even a free service would tempt me to use them, and they are effectively abandoning their LLU service.

luckwudaveit

Thanks, macman.

Just had a chat with OH about it all and we are probably going to stay with BT - we've had so many problems in the past that neither of us can face it again. We will probably ditch anytime calls and reduce unlimited BB to 40GB to cut costs instead.

macman

Ask for your MAC and see what deal you can screw out of BT then.

luckwudaveit

Just called BT and I have been offered 40GB BB with free eve & weekend calls for £10.25/mth. By going for Line Rental Saver this takes the monthly cost to £20.25 which is less than I'm paying now and BT tell me the most BB we used is just over 30GB, but generally it hovers around 10GB. The anytime calls will be an issue because of the 7pm start time for free evening calls, but this will have to be monitored. Looks like this is the best deal I'll get. Thanks all for the help.

macman

Anytime should only add about £4pm, so if you are near that it's worth upgrading.
You'll never get their best offer unless you ask for your MAC and get put through to retentions.

chanz4

Both of them are rubbish, o2 will give you a better deal than both and a decent router.