Thanks, Spandon, for your very useful and interesting reply. Sounds as if you have the router in your bedroom, where the "discreet" blue light would certainly seem bright and unwelcome - and possibly a heath hazard if one accepts medical advice to ensure NO AMBIENT LIGHTING if one wants maximum deep quiet sleep, so as to benefit maximally one's immune system!
OUR CURRENT ROUTER
I settled in the end for Plusnet's Hub 2. It had become clear, as the failed attempt by the Openreach guy had unwittingly demonstrated, that re-setting my line for the Hub 0) (ADSL) router, was not feasible - or at least likely to be problematical, and probably long-winded.
The new router works fine. I check the speeds regularly. Download is around 60 Meg. That 's despite over 0.5 mile between us and the relevant fibre-supplied cabinet, and despite the unpromisingly long line in from the "old but nice" GPO-type junction box where the line-in terminates (in our porch, since 1999) and the ADSL master socket. To reach the latter as the first socket on the line-in, the latter has to come bakc out of the porch and run up the front of the house into the loft. Halfway across the loft there is another old-model junction box, and then a further section of the line-in extension to my office. This room is upstairs at the back of the house, well out of line with the point where the line-in extension enters the loft.
Despite all this extra copper, and screw terminal connections (except at the ADSL socket), the download speed is consistently (dare I say!) around 60 Meg, with upload around 8.
We see little operational difference compared with our old Hub 0 connection. That's no doubt because most of our downloading and uploading involves only small files. Fortunately, the extra cost of the new contract is only about a Fiver per month more than the old one (that difference will obviously widen after 01/04/2023).
W don't, or don't yet, have at least one smart mobile phone. My wife is fiercely opposed to these intrusive, and personally risky, devices, and her opposition is based on points made by rare informed and objective organs of the UK press.
We don't have any other broadband wi-fi-dependent devices in our very well equipped, comfortable and easy-to-run house, so we don't need home wi-fi. So the router wi-fi is always off - done by the inconvenient and mildly long-winded procedure which I commented on earlier in this thread. This is a far cry (backwards) from the simple on/off button on the Hub 0 router!
TURNING THE ROUTER ON ONLY WHEN IT IS NEEDED (IN PRACTICE, FOR ONLY OUR CABLE-CONNECTED DESKTOP PC)
After all the warnings, and the threat of a 2-week drop in connection speed, which you were also given in the advice which you received from your Openreach man in 2020, I decided to try switching the router off overnight (merely to reduce consumption of that gold dust called mains electricity. No need, AFAIK, to cut electromagnetic radiation because w-fi function currently off).
When this made no difference to the speeds, which seem to be towards the top end for a mixed-technology line, I got bolder. I started switching off after my work in the morning, and switching on again later if needed. On one occasion there was only 10-minute gap between a switch-of and a switch-back-on -due to realising that Dumb-Egg's Off had been premature!
I hastened anxiously to the speed tester at each switch-on. I've now calmed down on this, because there has been no change in the line speeds.
I do agree with you that we need up-to-date, reasoned and correctly informed advice on this.
What is the point of trying to frighten customers into increasing their electricity consumption, and usually (though not in our case at present), their exposure to the clamed "low-level" radiation of wi-fi (particularly if a 5g wi-fi connection is normally used, so the router searches for this)?
You imply that these warnings (though we didn't then have 5G!) date back to our old Hub 0 ADSL router, so also probably to the flat "Technicolour" one that preceded it. I do recall something along those lines. Despite their much lower power consumption (compared with HUB 1 and 2), we used to keep both those routers Off except when needed. I tested speeds occasionally. They were always at the same modest figures, well within the limits promised by Plusnet.
That experience inclined me to be sceptical about the same warnings with the more modern technology.
As you say, one would expect this to be smarter in a respect such as that, not bogged down in the same old mumbo-jumbo.
What about 100% fibre? According, I think, to "Dan the Van" (a very helpful and well-informed earlier contributor to this thread), those warnings certainly apply there.
I do support your call for a "from the horse's mouth" statement. No more faffing about, please Plusnet/Openreach, just tell us the TRUTH!
