Bell Home Hub 2000 to 3000

When we first changed to Bell over 4 years ago, they gave us a Bell Home Hub 2000, for our Internet. It is also the hub for the television and it is the WiFi hub as well. Pretty much from day one, there were occasional issues with the Hub rebooting.

From day one, there were issues with wiring to and into the house, which Bell has completely repaired. This is still a copper set-up (no Fibre as of yet). The wiring from the pedestal to the house was repaired about a month ago, but it did not fix the rebooting issues.

Finally a home tech came about a week ago, to check the wiring one more time. He found that the copper infrastructure (not the bonded version needed for 100 Mbps) was working as it should. The only issue that remained was the Bell Home Hub 2000.

My wife decided to keep a log of when the hub rebooted. By Reboot, I mean it suddenly stops working and restarts. If you look in your logs, you will see that the Hub’s logging reverts back to the year 2012 for a little while until it finds a time source. These reboots were happening every 2nd day. Once the wiring to the house (to the point of entry of the house) was repaired, the frequency dropped. Bell hoped there would be no more reboots with the repair, but they still kept happening.

Luckily, the tech brought a Bell Home Hub 3000, the newer Internet Hub that Bell has in their package. It is not that new in terms of technology, but it has a much better CPU that the 2000. Both the tech and 3rd level support had noted that the CPU on the 2000 series was at 100% most of the time. This suggests our Internet usage was quite high.

That assumption makes sense, given that we have four adults who are all streaming, videoconferencing, and using the Internet throughout the day.

The tech installed the 3000 and it seems to be working no problem. There have not been any reboots, and a few other points were noticed.

• The video on the TV receivers (wireless) occasionally got jerky (stop and start), but that seems to have gone away.
• Video streaming from an IPTV source didn’t really work reliably, and now it does.
• VPNs for works are now working reliably as well.

The replacement Bell Home Hub 3000 seems to have resolved our Internet reliability issues. To get more throughput (100 Mpbs+), upgrades to the house wiring (bonded pair or fibre) will need to be made, and that may be the next step.

There are issues with buffering on the Bell Home Hub 3000, so there may still be problems ahead.

As with all Internet providers in Canada, price may end up being the important factor. Rogers may come in with a better deal yet (as they have already upgraded our neighbourhood to hybrid fibre), so that remains to be seen.

Epilogue

My Bell Home Hub 3000 was upgraded to having a battery backup. This was very useful as it would last a while during power outages.

This has now been replaced with a new Fibre modem (which allegedly has a Huawei SFP, which you should ask to be replaced with a Nokia SFP ). It is called a Giga Hub, but I will check into it’s specifications and make another report on it.