UPD Virgin Media Say New SuperHub Offers Best Home WiFi of the Big UK ISPs

Cable ISP Virgin Media (Liberty Global) has today highlighted the latest “independent testing” from the University of Bristol and Farncombe, which appears to show that their new SuperHub wireless broadband router offers better home WiFi performance than BT’s equivalent HomeHub4. It also beat similar kit from Sky Broadband and TalkTalk.

Readers might recall that the first round of results were published during May 2013 (here) and appeared to show Virgin’s new kit trouncing all over BT’s previous HomeHub 3, Sky Broadband’s SkyHub and one of TalkTalk’s similar Hubs (though we’re not quite sure which because TT has several).

The latest results have also pitted Virgin’s new SuperHub (aka – SuperHub V2) against BT’s latest HomeHub 4 router. But it’s worth noting that BT has since unveiled an enhanced version of this device for their superfast (FTTC) BTInfinity subscribers, which is of course called the HomeHub 5 (here); the WiFi specs for the HH4 and HH5 are similar. Likewise EE, which wasn’t tested, also has an arguably even more sophisticated device (here).

Overall Virgin Media claims that their new Super Hub “knocked the spots of the competition” and proved itself to be “30% faster than the closest rival hub” (i.e. BT’s HomeHub4).

Apparently the study tested wireless speeds across different locations / ranges in the home and the above table shows an average of the results, which does indeed show that the SuperHub’s 2.4GHz and 5GHz modes were able to best the competition. A specially built Windows 7 testing environments and file sizes optimised for download speed were also used in the testing.

Joe Lathan, Virgin Medias Director of Broadband, said:

“Our new Super Hub is designed to deliver a best-in-breed WiFi experience and it’s great to see the results of the testing by Farncombe and the University of Bristol reflect this. Our hub is clearly head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to speed, delivering the fastest wireless connections throughout the home compared to kit from our competitors.”

It should of course be said that Virgin Media was only pitting its router against those supplied by other big broadband ISPs and not the market as a whole. For example, if you buy a separate router then it’s already possible to take advantage of the latest Gigabit wifi speeds via the top-end 802.11ac spec, which most ISP bundled routers (except EE’s) don’t support.. yet.

Virgin Media “new” SuperHub Specifications (NetGear)

Cable Chipset: Intel Puma 5

Maximum: 8×4 Doscis 3.0 channels

2.4GHz Wifi Radio: Qualcom Atheros AR9344 (300Mbps)

2.4 GHz Antennas: Two Spatial streams (2×2)

5GHz Wifi Radio: Qualcomm Atheros AR9580 (450Mbps)

5 GHz Antennas: Three Spatial streams (3×3)*

4 x Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports**

1x USB 2.0 port (this doesn’t currently have a specific function)

Size: 215mm high x 69mm Wide (at widest point) x 195mm Long

Weight: 520g (unit without PSU)

UPDATE 1:05pm

In addition we’ve spotted that Virgin Media have just put out a new firmware update for their “new” SuperHub (oh please can we call it V2? “new” quickly gets old), which is called Version 26 and fixes the following issues:

* Time of Day inaccuracy when large amounts of data had been put through the New Super Hub.
* DNS resolution lost intermittently.
* Device not recovering following a TEK expiry event on some cable nodes.
* General stability improvements to internet connectivity and the GUI.

It should be winging its way to new SuperHub users over the next few weeks.