I’ve had Virgin Media broadband for a long time now- starting at the dizzy heights of 512K, but a recent upgrade had meant that I now no longer have a seperate cable modem, and instead have a Superhub. The Superhub is a integrated cable modem and router, supplied by Netgear, and with some VM branding.

I didn’t have high hopes: the device had a bad reputation from the start, though it’s subsequently had many firmware upgrades. Many people abandon the router and wireless functions, and use it as a modem alone, and this was my plan, once I’d got it activated. Activation was quick enough, and a quick test saw a very acceptable 65Mbit/sec, so a quick switch into modem mode, and another test- same sort of speed.

The disappointment came when I attached my router- not a domestic cheapy, but a low-end Cisco. I originally thought it had mis-negotiated the link speed, but it seems it was correct at 100/full, so it was unexpected to see only 38Mbit/sec. Remove the Cisco, back up into the 60s, so poor throughput from what is an enterprise device…

So then, can I make everything work with the Superhub? To be fair, for many people, it’s a perfectly useable device: minimal setup, one box. However, the Cisco has a full copy of IOS, and as such has a lot of facilities. A very different beast, it took a while to get round to doing, but it did mean I could use whatever network range I liked, mess with DNS to handle internal hosts, tweak DHCP accordingly, and update DDNS for accessing stuff here from the Internet.

Well, it turned out OK. A poke into the advanced settings shows that I can still do port forwarding. editing hosts files negates the some of the need for DNS trickery, changing the IP of one box fixes the network range to 192.168.0.x, and the noip2 client on that box means that the glaring omission of DDNS from the Superhub doesn’t matter.

So far, wired throughput is great, but one great truth of networking has shown itself- Wireless networks never perform at or even near the theoretical max: it’s currently set into a mode which should give up to 144Mbit- so faster than the Internet connection- but I’ve not seen better than 44Mbit, even with an 802.11n chipset. The next test might be to borrow a decent AP to see how much of this is down to the Superhub’s wireless electronics, but the fact is that wireless is a shared medium in a hostile environment, unlike good old Ethernet on UTP.

Time will tell, but so far, while it’s not Super, it seems an AdequateHub.