Vodafone Claims Home Broadband Router is “future proof”

Telecoms giant Vodafone, which after a slow start recently made their new fixed line Home Broadband service available to 22 million premises in the United Kingdom, has suggested that the bundled router they offer is “future proof,” but can any ISP router ever be described in such a way.

As most of our regular readers will know, we’re not especially big fans of dubious advertising and there’s a risk that calling any router “future proof” might well fall into that category. Never the less Vodafone appear to be adamant that the router they bundle, which supports advanced 802.11ac WiFi with beamforming, four Gigabit LAN ports, low power consumption and a bunch of other stuff (more details), might well qualify for the label.

Nikolas Choulakis, Voda’s Converged Terminals Assurance Manager, said:

“This router is future proof. Today it supports fibre and it also has best-in-class WiFi that supports a lot of older standards, but it also has the ability and the hardware to support what’s coming next.

In the meantime, you can do a heap of cool stuff like connect hard drives to create Network-Attached Storage (NAS) setups, which you can then access from any device in your house as if it were your own personal cloud. You can also pair WPS-enabled devices like smart phones or other Wi-Fi devices by pairing with the touch of a button.”

On the question of what Vodafone believes is “coming next“, Choulakis simply responded by saying “well, you’ll just have to wait and see.” The actual answer is either likely to reflect BTOpenreach’s 300-500Mbps G.fast technology or perhaps Vodafone will put some money where their mouth is and invest in a national Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network, but we wouldn’t bet on that last one.

At this point it’s worth noting that all of the major broadband ISPs, except for Sky Broadband perhaps (they’re a bit slower than most to keep their kit updated), tend to update their bundled routers every year or so. This is because the bundled hardware you sell is an important point of competition, but it doesn’t stay current for long and keeping up with evolving standards is a never ending process.

Certainly Vodafone appear to have a good competitive piece of kit, although we don’t yet have any figures for its rated Mbps speed on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz channels and in any case WiFi remains far from perfect. Even 802.11ac with Beamforming may struggle to deliver the full speed of a G.fast line or FTTH service beyond a couple of rooms away, where speeds tend to crash (plus G.fast will need new kit).

So can any router seriously be considered “future proof“? Computer and networking technology changes at an often frightening pace and none of that is likely to stop to save the marketing whims of a single ISP.