BT Smart Hub 2 and static routes - the wait goes on

[spbond]

I've just received a BT Smart Hub 2, the latest and greatest in BT's long history of ADSL\VDSL hubs, and in excited expectation plugged it in to see if, finally, a BT hub provided the ability to configure static routes.

Well - it doesn't.

Other manufacturers have provided static route configuration options for years so why can't BT give us the simple ability to allow its hubs to deliver IP traffic to different IP subnets?

'The vast majority of people don't need this functionality' I hear. The vast majority of people don't need DMZ or other functionality offered by the Smart Hub but how can a device that probably costed millions to design continually fail to offer relatively basic options?

It's back to the five year old TP-Link router which continues to blow the Smart Hub 2 out of the water for features.

[bobpullen]

I believe the Business variant of the SH2 does have static route functionality.

[spbond]

I've heard that elsewhere but can't find any BT documentation that confirms this.

[imjolly]

you have also to be a BT business user

[infinitywaiter]

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You won't be able to do this on the normal hub given out to consumers as it is locked, so the only way to do this is to be a business customer as already mentioned as the business hub is open and allows you to edit a lot more etc.

They don't expect the normal Tom, **bleep** and Harry customers to go fiddling around in any settings, they just expect us all to simply plug it in and leave it lol.

A simple search of this forum would have brought up previous threads about it like here...

https://community.bt.com/t5/Archive-Staging/Static-Routes-on-BT-Business-Smart-Hub-2/td-p/2193777

Plus, as stated on that post the business side is discussed on their own forum, this one is for consumers/residential only.

The other option is to just get your own third party router and use that instead of the BT hub, as you've already said.

[spbond]

I've seen that thread already but it was this comment that made me wonder if the Business Smart Hub 2 does provide static route functionality:

It would help if BT provided a manual that detailed more than simply how to insert a power and ethernet cable.

you can't set up static routes on business BT Smart Hub 2 because although its not locked down at the UI the firmware versions v0.13.06.07281-BT (Wed Jul 28 12:06:04 2021) or v0.12.03.01286-BT (Thu Jan 28 17:41:51 2021) have bugs which render this function inoperable in many situations

[fosterl2]

It is possible to achieve what you want with a little bit of network address planning. The workaround for the lack of static route capability is to use a "supernet" network mask on the BT hub:

If you set the hub IP addresses as for example private registered address of 192.168.1.254 and use a class B subnet mask of /16, or mask 255.255.0.0, then configure the device that connects to the hub as e.g. 192.168.1.1/24 or  mask 255.255.255.0.

This means you can then have 256 class C subnets of /24 or 255.255.255.0, which can go to different routable subnets on your local network.

The /16 mask tells the hub IP interface that it can find any address from 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255 down the hub's link to your router, but your router only knows that 192.168.1.0 - 192.168.1.254 is found on that link to route towards the internet. If for example 192.168.2.0/24 is on a different router interface in your network, your router will route it accordingly.

Any combinations of private registered address can be used - i.e. 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 or 192.168.0.0/16 with the masks altered accordingly.

[Crimliar]

Okay, so thanks to the wording of your question I'm curious as to what you are trying to do!  I've used routing previously to override hard-wired DNS, but redirecting traffic to different subnets seems a very specific usage scenario!