UK ISP BT Retail has officially unveiled its new HomeHub 3 (HH3) router, which in the near future (28th February 2011) will be supplied for free alongside any new orders for its home Total Broadband and new Infinity services (cleverly it has ports for both ADSL and FTTC broadband connections). Sadly existing customers will have to shell out a cool £46 for the privilege.

The new router (Weight: 350g), which is about half the size (106.8 x 185 x 62.2mm) of their current HomeHub 2 device, also uses a third less power than its predecessor and features Smart Wireless technology. This automatically selects the Wi-Fi (802.11n) channel with the least interference and if new devices are added then it will compensate for those too.

According to BT this is a feature that none of their ISP rivals have been able to offer. The operator claims that its router was the only one able to maintain a wireless connection even when there was a significant amount of interference. In fairness a savvy end-user would have no problems both checking for and changing Wi-Fi channels manually.


The HH3 also features four Ethernet ports (just one supports Gigabit Ethernet connections) and one-touch WPS secure Wi-Fi connectivity. Speaking of wireless, encryption is turned on by default, which is a wise and welcome move. No word on whether or not it supports IPv6 though.

UPDATE 10:45am

Added a quote from BT.

UPDATE 1:25pm

According to BT, the new Home Hub currently "supports IPv6 using IPv4 tunnelling", though it is apparently capable of running "native IPv6 and dual stack support through a software upgrade". BT Retail is said to be reviewing exactly how and when this upgrade should be undertaken.

Most of our older Home Hub 2's also "support IPv6 via IPv4 tunnelling" (i.e. not true native support) and have been used in this way in some of BT’s own IPv6 trials. BT claims that they are also in consideration for software upgrades, if required.