Apple Airport Express Equivalents?

Chris

Many thanks for your insight and apologies for my delayed reply.

I may have misled you a little, all of my items are hard wired via points in various rooms via Netgear switches. I have a Superuniti, 6 Sonos zones and a couple of smart TV's and an Oppo 205 Blu-ray player. The wireless aspect is only used for an iPad and iPhone etc to operate the music systems and type the occasional e-mail and browse the web.

It all works very well, but My Time Capsule is over 8 years old and for a hard drive I guess that's a long time, that coupled with the increased speed that I would like has led me to consider something like BT Infinity, and I wondered if their Home Hub is any good? I could replace the router aspect of the TC with it and still make Time Machine backups to a separate hard drive. I had a bad experience last week when my internet was down and despite making all the obvious checks with my equip including swopping the Draytek Vigor Modem over for a spare I had I couldn't cure the problem. So my ISP arranged for BT (Open Reach) to call and check the line to the house, they found that both my Vigor Modems were faulty and now I'm faced with  potential charge of £169 plus VAT as it was my equip fault. My thinking is simply that as I would like a fibre connection why not use their modem/router i.e. Home Hub if it was good enough, then if ever there was an equip fault in the future its down to them.

Chris

Chris, in your setup if you want to replace your Apple access points then any Wifi access point from Linksys, BT, Google or Ubiquiti etc should be fine. Connect them to your wired switches...

As far as line checking.. it’s always worth checking on the BT line checker with the test results first... this will indicate if line wiring to your master socket is questionable..

https://www.btwholesale.com/in...ws_furls_adslchecker

Put in your number and look at the Premise Equipment test results at the bottom of the table. If each item has an N then your wiring to your master socket is almost certainly fine.

The latest BT Homehub is quite an advanced device.. and does provide diagnostic info to BT again if you think your twisted pair line is faulty.

Many thanks Simon, just did that and I get :

Bridge Tap: U

VRI: N

NTEFaceplate: N

I replaced the VIgor 120 with their 130 model which has Fibre capability, it was the quickest way to get up and running again. Will certainly give the BT Home Hub consideration.  Do you know if BT have to physically change anything for a fibre connection in the house or is it simply a switchover outside and at their exchange?

Thanks again.

Chris 

For fibre connection yes it will be different equipment BT provides, but you won’t be using a Vigor 120 or 130 for fibre. If you are talking about fibre to the cabinet, Superfast broadband, that uses something called VDSL and that comes over your twisted  pair copper connection. and in which case BT don’t need to do anything more if you already have a reasonably recent master socket which the test result seems to suggest.

ChrisG posted:

Chris

 

Many thanks for your insight and apologies for my delayed reply.

I may have misled you a little, all of my items are hard wired via points in various rooms via Netgear switches. I have a Superuniti, 6 Sonos zones and a couple of smart TV's and an Oppo 205 Blu-ray player. The wireless aspect is only used for an iPad and iPhone etc to operate the music systems and type the occasional e-mail and browse the web.

It all works very well, but My Time Capsule is over 8 years old and for a hard drive I guess that's a long time, that coupled with the increased speed that I would like has led me to consider something like BT Infinity, and I wondered if their Home Hub is any good? I could replace the router aspect of the TC with it and still make Time Machine backups to a separate hard drive. I had a bad experience last week when my internet was down and despite making all the obvious checks with my equip including swopping the Draytek Vigor Modem over for a spare I had I couldn't cure the problem. So my ISP arranged for BT (Open Reach) to call and check the line to the house, they found that both my Vigor Modems were faulty and now I'm faced with  potential charge of £169 plus VAT as it was my equip fault. My thinking is simply that as I would like a fibre connection why not use their modem/router i.e. Home Hub if it was good enough, then if ever there was an equip fault in the future its down to them.

Chris

Chris, I'm not a BT customer, neither do I have fibre, so better to follow Simon's informed advice than any ideas from me on that!

Regarding Time Machine, I have a very inexpensive WD MyCloud NAS which I use for this. It only cost about £75 for a 3TB one, and it seems to work fine to back up 2 Macs with no tricky setup required. So if you retire the TC, there's a suggestion for you.

Thanks guys all very useful information, I feel a lot more confident now about going to fibre!

Chris