My FTTP cable has been damaged by a tree, mini hub woe’s

[mickbaugh2]

5 days ago, an FTTP fibre cable that supplies my street was snapped by a falling tree, about 400m away from my house. BT have sent me a mini hub as I have ‘Fibre 250 with BT Halo 1’

This little device uses a 4G sim to provide an internet connection, you can connect to the mini via WI FI or USB

My problem is that 90% of the internet-connected devices in my house are connected to a Netgear Switch that is connected to my Smart Hub 2 via cat 7 Ethernet cables, having WIFI via the mini is not going to help those devices. Has anyone managed to bridge the internet connection that the Mini has to their original network? If so, how did you do it?

I was hoping that the Smart Hub 2 would play nicely with the mini Hub when the mini was plugged into the USB port at the back of the Smart Hub. No such luck

[licquorice]

I suspect the only way you will be able to do it is to buy a WDS capable device with an Ethernet port to bridge the mini hub to your network.

[Anonymous]

The Netgear EX6000 Wi-Fi repeater uses both 5 and 2.4ghz.

If you want to, you can set it to connect to the 4g hub using the 5GHz band and connect your devices to the 2.4 GHz carrier. Netgear call this configuration Fastlane and the 5GHz carrier is used exclusively for connection to the hub, meaning only the 2.4GHz band will be available for your devices.

EDIT: I forgot to add that it also has an ethernet port that your switch could connect to

[licquorice]

How is that going to provide Ethernet capability, its just a wifi repeater?

[Anonymous]

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@licquoricewrote:

How is that going to provide Ethernet capability, its just a wifi repeater?

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No it's not, see the edit in my previous post

[licquorice]

Posted before your edit. Yes, a suitable device.

[Anonymous]

It wont be superfast, I think it has a limit of 6 devices connecting at any one time, but it will do as you ask.

http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/EX6000/EX6000_UM_3sep2015.pdf

[mickbaugh2]

Thanks for the suggestions, I didn't want to buy new hardware for what I thought was going to be a 3 or 4 day outage. Openreach have now said they will hopefully replace the broken cable on the 15th of June 2020. 13 days after the initial fault report.

As for the BT mini-hub, in my opinion, it's a poor solution. It would've been infinitely better if the Smart Hub 2 could take a 4G SIM directly, as the DrayTek Vigor 2862 can, or allow WAN access via the mini-hub plugged into the USB port of the SH2

I did also try internet sharing and network adaptor bridging in windows 10. I couldn't get it to work as I needed

I suppose this incident reminds me just how good FTTP is... when it's working.