Bell Rolls Out Their Gigahub To Replace The HH4000…. And It Has Some Issues That I Would Like To Understand Which Is Why I Need Your Help
One of the things that came with my recent Bell Install is was the Home Hub 4000 (AKA: HH4000) hardware, which I have effectively bypassed by using first this method and then this method to do it. But since Bell has been rolling out a new piece of hardware as they roll out 8Gbps service in an attempt to make their chief rival Rogers as extinct as a T-Rex. That piece of hardware is called the Gigahub. On the surface it looks like an HH4000, but it’s not. The main difference is that it comes with WiFi 6E rather than WiFi 6. Which if you have hardware that supports WiFi 6E you can get faster WiFi speeds as you will be on a less congested frequency. But under the hood, it runs different firmware which implies that there are other differences that users are not aware of. And perhaps some of those differences are starting to appear in the form of problems that users of this new modem are having.
For example, there is a thread on DSL Reports where people are having issues with PPPoE pass through which is by far the cleanest way to use your own hardware. That is assuming that your router can handle the overhead that PPPoE creates so that you get the speed that you’ve paid Bell for. Reading through the thread, it seems that users are not only having a variety of issues, but some of this appears to have been escalated to Sagecomm who makes the hardware for Bell. Thus if you want to go the route of using your own gear via PPPoE pass through, you may want to be aware that at present, this may not work for you.
The second thing that I have noted is some anecdotal evidence that using the DMZ method may not work nearly was well as it did with the HH4000. I use the word “anecdotal” because I have not directly touched this hardware and tried to troubleshoot this myself. Nor is there anything that I can find online that validates what I am hearing. But a couple of people have reached out to me for help as the documentation that I have created to assist people in setting this up doesn’t seem to work anymore. At least not without some extra tinkering.
Thus I am asking for a favour. If you are in the Greater Toronto Area, and you get this Gigahub from Bell and you wish to set it up to use your own gear, I am willing to assist with that for free (as I normally charge for my services) so that I can better understand what the issues with the Gigahub are so that I can better communicate to the readers of this blog how to set this hardware up so that it can be used with your own hardware. Thus if that’s you, please reach out to me by email and we’ll take it from there.
In the meantime, if you get new service from Bell, or you upgrade to faster service, you should try ask for or keep the HH4000 as that is clearly a stable platform that works. At least until whatever issues with the Gigahub are sorted.
UPDATE: I have additional information here.
October 16, 2022 at 8:14 am
Hello,
Any news with the HH4000 GIGA, pppoe with a asus XT8.
I thought I was going crazy because it was not working.
Reading above, it seems I am not.
Regards,
October 16, 2022 at 9:02 am
I haven’t had access to a Gigahub either though my clients or getting one here in my home office. So I don’t have any news to share. I’ve posted a request that if anyone in the GTA has one of these, I would very much like to try and troubleshoot this hands on so that I can update my guide of how to set these up.
https://itnerd.blog/2022/10/13/bell-rolls-out-their-gigahub-to-replace-the-hh4000-and-it-has-some-issues-that-i-would-like-to-understand-which-is-why-i-need-your-help/
October 18, 2022 at 3:01 pm
I have the gigahub and I have established two passthrough sessions with OPNsense (two different boxes).
October 28, 2022 at 8:29 am
I have the Gigahub in Kingston and i wasn’t able to get PPPoE to work either. the DSL reports thread you linked does have a reply from a Bell rep on 18 Oct:
“Bell_Dom
join:2009-02-04
Quick update for y’all!
I should have an early firmware sometime in November to patch this up that I can push to your modems. I have kept notes of everyone on here that posted in the direct area concerning this and I will update you in your threads when it is ready! ”
reading through the thread it appears that those people who are on GPON (like myself) need to wait for the firmware update. the ones that are working though seem to be connected via XGS-PON.
November 1, 2022 at 9:33 am
[…] might recall that I wrote about the new Bell Gigahub which is part of their 8 Gbps fibre rollout, and the troubles that some […]
November 24, 2022 at 9:27 am
Hey, I still have the old HH3000 and I tried multiple times to use my own router Asus rt 89x to bypass the router but have failed to find any guide for us here in the Atlantic area(we do not have a username and password) has anyone heard of a way to do it here? I tried cloning the mac address and changing the MTU and IPTV settings but have never had any luck what so ever. I’m not even sure how they authenticate the connection here and I have tried to get it out of the upper tech support many times😅. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas I’d be glad to try it.
Thanks, Chad
December 6, 2022 at 10:40 am
[…] been tracking issues with Bell’s new Gigahub which is part of their 8 Gbps fibre rollout. Specifically there were […]
January 10, 2023 at 9:00 am
[…] here. I should note that the Gigahub which is going out to all new Bell customers has had some issues which Bell admits to and resolved for the most part. Though there seems to be a couple new issues […]
January 25, 2023 at 2:09 pm
[…] Gigahub which is the hardware that they supply to their Bell Fibe customers. Out of the box, it had issues. And I put out a request for help identifying these issues as I was getting a lot of emails asking […]
February 2, 2023 at 5:25 pm
Hi there. I recently had a Gigahub installed with a fibre line to my home. We have 2 phone lines, one for an office. The Bell tech told me the hub could support two lines (there are two jacks as you know), but other Bell reps have told me that’s not possible, unless the second line is set up as an ‘Ident-a-call’ number (on the same line). They have offered to run a second fibre line to the home and provide a second hub to support the second phone line which sounds bizarre. I would like to find out whether the Gigahub can or cannot properly support 2 phone lines.
February 2, 2023 at 5:32 pm
I have not tested or have any clients that have this use case. But Bell themselves advertise a second line as an option:
https://www.bell.ca/Home_phone/Add_a_second_phone_line
My advice would be to visit a Bell store. They from my experience and my client’s experiences provide better service and can help you to get better answers than the call centre people who are outsourced.
March 10, 2023 at 8:01 am
I have the new hub, I tried the 2 ways you mentionned in your post, but the only way I reached the speed I am paying for with my RT-AX86U is to use ppoe on the 2.5g and the fast eth port on the gigahub I reached 1.7g on my download and .970g on th upload ( service 1.5g) . Dmz the upload sucks it seems that it takes for ever to reach dns translation after it is reached you get a decent speed.
March 18, 2023 at 11:28 am
It’s a few months after your original post, but I am happy to say that I’ve received my Gigahub today and connected it to my current network which is routed through a Sonicwall which seems to connect fine (I currently have it setup with my other ISP to do failover which seems to be working).
August 10, 2023 at 11:59 am
I have a GigaHub (replacing Rogers cable). It came with firmware that fixed known bugs.
I have always built my own routers out of PCs. This time I used Fedora 38. For firewalling I used Firewalld, more user-friendly than direct netfilter commands.
My router PC is an inexpensive unit from AliExpress. It has four 2.5g ethernet ports and an Intel Celeron N5105 processor. See servethehome.com for reviews of these things. It is much cheaper than a crazy high-end consumer wireless router.
Observations:
I tried Advanced DMZ but had problems that I wasn’t able to diagnose quickly. On to of that, I could not figure out how Advanced DMZ could safely share an IP between my router and the GigaHub. For example, each would use random ports for NAT and there is no way of co-ordinating port assignment.
I used PPPoE. This gave my router and the GigaHub separate globally routable IP addresses.
I could not connect to certain web sites until I added TCP_MSS_clamping. I added the clamping using a Firewalld “policy object”. There are hints that some PPPoE software (i.e. Roaring Penguin’s) can do that instead of using a firewall rule. This need for clamping suggests that Path MTU discovery wasn’t working. I didn’t figure out why.
The need for clamping or PMTU discovery is all due to PPP stealing 8 bytes of each packet. There were hints I found that Bell would allow PPP to negotiate a 1508 packet size so the the MTU could be 1500. This would eliminate the need for clamping. Unfortunately this would require both sides of the PPP tunnel to conform to an ancient IETF RFC that was never ratified and hence has expired — no thanks.
How is performance? PPPoE can be handled by my router at the full 1.5g speed I’m paying for. The router can run Bell’s speedtest itself but gets a disappointing result: the web page itself requires more CPU than is available. When I speedtest from a client on my LAN, my notebook with a Ryzen 6800H gets full speed but my notebook with an i3-1005g1 does not. I cannot say anything about a 3g service.
October 13, 2023 at 8:20 pm
I am in Guelph and I just got connected to Bell 1.5Gbps/940Mbps. I am still keeping my Rogers service until I can get a stable connection through Bell. I went though your instructions on how to set up Advanced DMZ+ DHCP. I am getting a connection but it is unstable. Half of my pings to google.ca are getting dropped. It seems like when the connection is made it is fast. Not sure if your offer still stands but I would appreciate any advice. I don’t want to give up and go to PPPoE passthough just yet unless you think that’s a good solution.
October 13, 2023 at 8:23 pm
Question. Do you have a Gigahub?
October 13, 2023 at 8:24 pm
And what router are you using?