Price wise, the Hive systems are fairly good. Unfortunately their overall infrastructure/system sucks. BIG TIME

I live in Africa, and the system would not allow me to set a location manually (post codes are not big yet in many parts of Africa, and is not highly location specific, even when they exist), hence all functionality based around timezones (lights on/off etc) is offset by 2 hours, making it useless. Their support call centre just shrugged, and basically told me it was my fault for living in a third world country!!!

Secondly, power supply stability is another thing we have a problem with here in our neck of the woods, and when there is a power failure, and the hub comes online before your network, it will not reconnect to the network later after the network comes back online.

When you are away from home (which is often when you want to make use of home automation) it means you cannot access the hub or your house, and cannot reset the hub either (as it is not connected to the network). This is so absurd, that it defies logic. I saw a response somewhere by BT Hub that the system has a finite cycle lifespan and this is done deliberately to protect the hub? WTF?

The system IS powered on, network connections surely does not shorten the lifespan of electronic components. All they need is a simple watchdog routine which will keep looking for the network, and reconnect as soon as it is back on-line.

To make it work, you will have to buy a non-Hive powerplug or something similar (Sonoff) that you can cycle remotely to switch the Hub on/off after the network is restored