Billion BiPAC 7800N review

Not worth the price

Bought one of these on the strength of this and glowing reviews on Amazon etc. I had a Netgear DG834PN and found that the BT Home Hub2 I had had in a box for month improved the wireless signal strength by 10% points. I assumed at the price, and in light of the reviews, this would be much better. Wrong!!

Tried it using two lap tops in two different rooms both running iStumbler and Air Radar and the wifi performance for this was either no better, or even worse, than the Home Hub. Then again I suppose the Home Hub is also £90 if you are not a BT customer so maybe it's not surprising.

I have raised a support ticket to Billion to see if there are any tweaks they can suggest to get this perform as well as the hype suggests but if not, needless to say, it will be going back to Amazon for a refund.

There may be routers out there offering a better wifi signal than the BT Home Hub but for mea at least it is NOT this one.

By Empgamer on 17 Jan 2011

Reliable

I needed to replace a Speedtouch modem that was dropping the line badly (It would sometimes take me an hour to get a connection). So reliability was an absolute must. I read loads of reviews and all seemed to be followed by user comments rubbishing the product. There were fewer comments about Billion than most others - and some very positive comments about their after sales service so I bought a 7800N. I now have a rock solid 100% stable connection that never drops out. Firmware is now 1.06. There seem to have been some problems with firmware 1.02 from what I read.

I was prepared to pay over the odds for assurance of reliability and some future proofing. I got it.

By PlacidoD on 2 Sep 2011

You need to optimise the settings

To get the very best from the Billion 7800N you really need to optimise the settings. I've produced a help page at http://www.spaldwick.com/billion-7800n, which gives settings for the SNR margin tweak and turning on impulse noise protection.

By Spaldwick on 10 Oct 2011