The Hub 5 was originally released to some customers who seem to have been contacted by VM out of the blue and offered one. What doesn't seem too have been mentioned to them was the fact that the 5 really was in a 'trial' state, had numerous issue and features which didn't work and, no doubt, other bugs still undiscovered but, well, that's what the mugs trialists are for isn't it.
Latterly, it has been moved to a soft launch phase (no, no idea either), not sure if any more people are being offered one or not.
What we do know is that currently, the telephone ports on it do not work, so it can't be offered to anyone with a VM telephone service which connects directly to the hub. Similarly it doesn't work with the VM wifi pods, so that rules it out for anyone using those and also rules it out (or at least should) from being offered to anyone on particular contracts (Gig One, VOLT contracts, I think), which includes free pods - slightly embarrassing to admit that 'yes Mr customer you are fully entitled to free WiFi pods, and we will send them out to you, alas they won't work! Sorry about that'
Judging by posts on this forums, there appear to be issues with the web server in it showing all the stability of a jelly, poor wifi performance (well nothing new there then), inability to setup some functions (port forwarding) and persistent reports that VPN connections to work don't work with the 5 whereas they did with earlier models.
Now we can't tell exactly how prevalent these issues actually are, was there a batch of Hub 5 shipped out with manufacturing defects, are they all like it but most users never go into the settings and are used to flakey wifi so simply haven't experienced problems? Who knows?
There have been claims of firmware updates being pushed out to 'fix' the VPN problems - yet there are still recent posts complaining of issues with this and other functions.
All I can say is that I certainly would not want to have one in the state it appears to be in, our advice for those with one and post here looking for help is simply this, try a full factory reset of it and see if that fixes the problems, if not then contact VM and just request, no demand, that they replace the 5 with a previous model. Ideally the user hasn't send their older hub back that so it should (and I stress should as there have been many cases of people simply being lied to and told it wasn't possible), be a simple matter for them to reconnect the old hub and for VM to re-activate it on their account.
