My BT Home Hub died a horrible death last week when an automatic update failed. Since then I have been unable to connect to it via wireless or ethernet. I followed BTs advice and held in the Wireless Association button on the back for 20 seconds to do a hub restart. This didnt help in the slightest. I finally sorted it out by doing a manual update on the bios. I felt like sharing the steps I used to get it fully functional again so it may help any other “lucky” users of the BT Home Hub 😅
- Download the latest firmware and updater from BT here
- Unzip it on your system
- Unplug the hub so its powered down
- Connect your machine to the hub via an ethernet cable
- Give your machine a static ip in the default dhcp range i.e. 192.168.1.65
- Run menu.exe from the UpgradeWizard directory you unzipped before, agree and click next like crazy until you get to the part where it tries to find the hub on the network, this is the step that kept failing for me before I stumbled across the trick below
- Heres the trick: hold down the Wireless Association button and then turn on the hub i.e. connect it back to the mains.
- Keep the button pressed in for about 15 seconds while the hub is booting up i.e dont release it while your powering the device on, just keep it pressed down the whole time, all the lights should come on and then die down again
- Now tap next on the hub updater software, if everything went ok it should now find the hub and start the update process, a very exciting moment after 2 days of head2desk bangingÂ

- It’ll let you know when its done
- Now try connecting to 192.168.1.254 which is the hubs default address
- presto! your in, now just configure it to your liking
Notes
I also had to disable my wireless network for this to work, otherwise the updater software kept trying to find the hub via the wireless connections IP address which would never work since its a totaly different IP range.
I also shutdown the firewall to be on the safe side although I’m not sure whether it would of stopped the update from working.
I used an IP in the default range since I could tell the hub had been reset to factory defaults at some point. I saw this since the wireless network reported the default SSID being available, if it hadnt set itself back to defaults then it would of shown the last SSID that I created. This led me to belive the IP range had been reset as well although it was just a guess. If you can see your old SSID then try whatever the IP range you used before was including the address you use to conenct to the hub.