Use your BT Home Hub – Use it as a print server – Windows Vista guide

This article was written for the BT Home Hub V1 only and has not been tested on any other versions.

Have you ever wondered what that USB port on your BT Home Hub was for? Well it turns out that you can use it to connect a printer to and therefore turning you BT Home Hub into a print server.

For some reason BT don’t seem to share this information easily, I don’t know why though as personally I think it’s another selling point for them. The only reason I can think of is that they don’t want to support it.

To set this up, follow the below (Windows XP users, click here):

1. Connect your printer to the USB port on the BT Home Hub
2. Start the Add New Printer Wizard
3. Select to Add a local printer
4. Select create a new port and select Standard TCP/IP port from the list
5. Click Next
6. Enter 192.168.1.253 in the ‘Hostname or IP address’ field and it should replicate to the ‘Port name’ field too, if not, enter it there also
7. Untick the ‘Query the printer and automatically select the drivers to use’ box
8. Select Custom and click the settings button
9. Select LPR
10. Select LPR Byte Counting Enabled
11. Enter the Queue Name as LPT1
12. Click OK
13. Click Next
14. Select your printer from the list or if it’s not listed there you can click ‘Have Disk’
15. Click Next
16. Change the name of the printer if you want and select whether or not it should be your default printer
17. Click Next
18. Click ‘Print Test Page’
19. Click Finish

That’s it, you should now be able to print to a USB printer connected to your BT Home Hub.

We’ve received mixed feedback from visitors about using the BT Home Hub as a print server. It works great for some and then also others report that it only prints once until the printer is unplugged and then reconnected to the hub. We believe this problem is main found where the printer required bi-directional communication (i.e. printer status etc) and the BT Home Hub doesn’t seem to handle it well. If you are able to turn printer status checks etc off, it may be worth trying that.

Unfortunately we no longer have access to a BT Home Hub to try and figure out the true cause of these problems and therefore are unable to offer any support or solutions.

However, we hope you have found this article useful.