For some, the euphoria caused by the sudden appearance of BT Sport on their YouView box has already been tempered by the realisation that their self-bought routers won’t work with the channels and that they’ll have to revert to BT’s dreadful HomeHub 3.
My personal experience of the HH3 is that it loses at least half my Infinity connection’s speed – use by Apple Airport Express and I get speeds above 72Mbps, use the HH3 and I’m lucky to get 40Mbps.
When I see BT Infinity customers complain about their speeds on Twitter, I often wonder how much of the issue is caused by that nasty little router.
In order to display the BT Sport test channel appeared at YouView EPG slot 900 while retaining decent WiFI speeds I’ve switched off the Home Hub’s internal WiFi connection, connected my Apple Airport Express to it via an ethernet cable and put it into bridge mode.
If you want to try that yourself, you’ll find the ability to switch the Home Hub’s WiFi connection off under the Advance Settings page in the Home Hub manager and the instructions to put the Apple Airport Express (or other Apple Airport models) into bridge mode here.
But by happy coincidence I might have found myself in (temporary) possession of a router which supports both the IGMP Multicast protocol used by BT for its channels and which offers decent WiFi speeds.
Requested before the channels appeared on Tuesday evening, a courier arrived today with a loan TP-Link Archer C7 router. You’ll find it on Amazon here.
I’ve only had a chance to give it a pretty cursory check-over, but first impressions are very positive.
And, here’s where it could be good news, the test BT Sport channel seemed to work just fine without a single setting being changed or tweaked.
I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable suggesting anyone rushed out and bought one just on the strength of this quick and rough test, not least because until the channels fully launch it’s impossible to know whether BT might add a little extra magic sauce to the recipe which requires that you use its Hub.
But it might just be possible that the Archer C7 is the answer some users have been seeking.
