Hub of things

After a fairly hefty bill from those lovely people at British Telecom Internet for excess internet usage over Christmas I reluctantly concluded that I was going to have to move from my BT option 1 10gb allowance to their Unlimited option. Having just set up my own PC repair firm and with a tendency to have internet TV and Radio on the go while I am working, the decision to move to an unlimited tariff was something of a no-brainer compared to the excess charges. BT sweetened the deal with the offer of a free Home hub. 

For those unfamiliar with Home hub its essentially a proprietary wireless router for BT users; a rather stylish concave black affair minus the usual collection of aerials, four blue LED's show power, wireless, internet and telephone status. The router allows you to add a second phone via the router and VOIP and BT boast that international calls can be made for around 1p a minute. Calls to the UK at weekends and the evenings are free. Each hub is equipped with its own telephone number, mine starts with 05 a number which up to number I have associated with premium rate numbers which only goes to show what I know!  

I had heard some horror stories about installing Home hub on Windows machines and as a Linux user suspected that things would be difficult. As it turned out I could not have been more wrong. Once the router was plugged in and the Ethernet hooked up it was simply a matter of rebooting my PC and I was connected. For windows users there is a CD with a setup.exe although it looks like a standard Ethernet connection to me. 

The Home hub, aside from acting as a VOIP link also supports USB. I plugged an external hard drive and the hub recognised it as part of the network. To date I have not had time to check speeds or if it will stream media. If it does it could be a very useful feature indeed. 
As a router, speed have been good and the interface is fairly clear. I can't find any mention of NAT or Port forwarding but I may have missed something. But for now at least 8/10 and it could get better.