Home hub and reserving IP addresses on a home network.

[M-D-F]

Can someone tell me if the bt home hub enables reserving of a specific chosen IP address on a home network based on the Mac address of a connected device. I use this feature on my sky router for a number of home devices and don't want to lose the ability to do so if I switch to BT. I have not been able to find any detailed manuals online explaining more advanced features of their routers and have not really been able to find out which router I would be sent for a fibre essential plan (fibre to the box, copper to the house 30mbps). How can this information be so hard to find! Any help would be appreciated.

[WSH]

Yes, there is a setting somewhere in the DHCP for "Always use this address".

Personally, I prefer a proper static address, which is any address below 64.

[M-D-F]

Thanks for the swift response. I agree about static ip being preferable but not all my devices allow it in their settings. Can you reserve a chosen IP or do you have to keep an assigned one as static. I like to group devices with chosen ip's it's just neater.

What would I get homehub 5? 

[WSH]

A  Smart Hub 2.

It's under Home>Advanced settings>My network

Find your device in the list and double click on it then set it to always use this IP address.

Just been looking and an old laptop of mine I was working on while I set the hub up, ages ago, still has the IP I set manually on the laptop through Windows , 192.168.1.99  It seems this had been set to "Always use this address" automatically.

[M-D-F]

I thought the smart hub was only for full fibre to the house broadband and homehub was for everything else?

So if I wanted my all my Sonos devices to be in the 50's for example I could specify that?

[WSH]

The Home Hub 5 is long obsolete.

In fact, the Smart Hub 2 is over due for replacement.  It does both DSL/FTTC and FTTP though.

As I said, the default on the SH2 is that anything up to 64 is not issued by DHCP and is a static address, so yes, I would think 50's would be fine.

[M-D-F]

Thanks for the help

[licquorice]

Just to clarify it is not possible to allocate addresses with the Home Hub2, only the option for the device to keep the same address once allocated.

I guess there is a very tedious workaround in asuch as the DHCP range can be specified so in theory you could reduce the DHCP range to the addresses you require until they have all been allocated how you want them and then open up the range again afterwards.

[WSH]

@licquorice   That's what I thought but something strange has gone on.

As I said, when I looked at my own, it had set 192.168.1.99 as a static address and switched on "Always use this address" despite me only setting that address via Windows on the laptop when I was first configuring the SH2 offline.  I didn't set that on the SH2 as the laptop configuration was only temporary while I set the SH2 up.  Nothing else was connected, so it wouldn't clash with a DHCP address and making it permanent on the SH2 wasn't necessary.  So how that setting got on there is weird.

The implication would seem to be that if you connect a device with a static address set on its NIC then the SH2 automatically logs it and switches on “Always use this address”.

[M-D-F]

So near and yet so far😁