I’ve had loads of consumer routers, every single one has been shit. I think it’s just best to separate the WiFi from the routing.
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ive only ever stuck with the ISP one. I have a separate WIFI AP in another room via cable. It could be better…
Idiot question:
If I was to kill the wifi on the Virgin router and use a BT mesh dooberry but still wanted to hardwire some stuff into the network,do I need to also get an ethernet switch of some description?
Hub in modem mode -> ethernet switch -> mesh?
No just use the ports on the hub, they still work.
I don’t have the Virgin router. I simply connected my BT Mesh to the Sky router and off we went. I have 2 Wi-Fi networks (which is useful as I am the only one who can use the Sky Wi-Fi) and all the hi-fi gear (and some dull crap like Hive) via ethernet using a switch into the router.
Next idiot question: anyone had issues with Chromecasts of various descriptions not talking to the mesh wifi? We have never managed to make one work in any holiday house with a standard BT router.
There have been problems with the BT Home Hub 6. Workrounds include using only the 2.4GHz wifi (not 5GHz) or setting up the CC with a mobile hotspot then changing its settings to the home ones. Seems a faff.
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And the next question is:
Given that Virgin’s DNS servers suck (regular dropouts which the laptop network identifies as DNS servers being unavailable) and you can’t change them on a network wide basis through the Superhub 3, are there any decent inexpensive gigabit ethernet routers around so I can just use the Virgin box in modem mode and make everything use OpenDNS?
interesting you are having probs with VMs DNS - ours are rock solid. Yes stick the VM SH3 in modem mode and use a router.
I’ve had very few problems with their DNS, but if you have a couple of most used devices, you could always set their DNS manually in the network settings to get around the router settings. Works as a temporary solution.
If you’ve got dozens of smartphones/PCs then obviously it’s a major arseache.
Apparently their DNS servers are regional, so it could be a postcode lottery. And we also have a couple of IoT type things (solar inverter/car charger hub/probably a Powerwall) and a Pi or 3 which don’t have the option of manually setting the server.
Edit: if it was just used wired, any reason why a TPLink Archer C7 wouldn’t do the job?
I have had no problems with the Virgin DNS servers, but I still don’t use them 
I use an Asus RT-N66u I think it is. It’s wifi - I bought it before my wifi mesh system. It works well - it’s easy to make changes to settings etc.
Why not use a pi for the job? Guide here: https://blog.monotok.org/setup-raspberry-pi-dhcp-server/ and you could install pi-hole https://pi-hole.net/ and it’s an ad blocker as well.
Standard VM router doesn’t give those options for DHCP.
Would that not work with the VM box in modem mode then?
^^ This is brilliant and you can set it to use dnscrypt and dnssec if you are really paranoid.
My firewall used to test DNS response times and VM was much slower compared to Google, OpenDNS and cloudflare.
Not that it would make much of a difference for home users though.
Looks like pi-hole would be the DHCP server as well, so it should work with just that and the Virgin box in modem mode
No, you’d need something to do the NAT’ing (and routing)
Yes of course, you need something with two NICs at least, duh
it does make a difference at home, so many web pages have bits from lots of different places on them (even with an ad-blocker they get fetched i think) that a poor DNS response really slows things down. I switched to openDNS (from talktalk’s own) and it’s really helped.
If you notice a difference then use cloudflare it’s faster than Cisco’s OpenDNS.
PiHole also caches the DNS records but doesn’t let the client download blocked content, it replaces the record with an ‘unavailable content’ so the client doesn’t sit there waiting for adverts and pictures etc to load.