UK ISP BT Publish Speedtests of their Smart Hub WiFi Router vs Rivals

BT has published a number of WiFi speedtests for their new Smart Hub broadband router, which pitted the kit against rival hardware from TalkTalk, Sky Broadband, Virgin Media, Plusnet and EE. The results appear to support the ISPs claim that their router “provides the most powerful wi-fi,” at least in comparison to the kit bundled by their rivals.

Apparently the testing, which only examined the data transfer performance of their wireless network (latency wasn’t considered), was based on the IEEE802.11T WLAN Test Methods and also took into account previous Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) rulings, such as related guidance on making WiFi performance claims (several ISPs have fallen foul of these, including BT – examples here, here and here).

The testing itself, which examined performance under both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands (using a Macbook Pro with 3 antennas and a Samsung Galaxy S4), took place both in a lab and around 10 “real homes” that were apparently “fully furnished and of different construction types.” The results of the latter appeared to support BT’s own lab testing.

Below we’ve published a summary of the results from BT’s test house at their Adastral Park research facility, which we’ve selected because it’s the only one that also includes some of the newer rival routers like the fairly new Sky Q Hub and Virgin’s SuperHub 3.0. Otherwise you can read the full report here.

The scores are presented in the form of Megabits per second (Mbps) across different rooms in the test house. Note that the Sky Hub SR102 doesn’t produce anything for 5GHz because the kit only supports the 2.4GHz band. Sadly BT didn’t test their other HomeHub 5 router, although Plusnet’s Hub One is based off the same hardware and may be a fairly close match.