Re: [Hampshire] [OT] BT Broadband?!

On Thursday 14 July 2011 12:19:59 Chris Dennis wrote:
> Hello folks
>
> I find myself being tempted away from the reliable plainness of
> UKFSN/Entanet broadband towards the glossy excitement of BT broadband.
>
> For these reasons:
> * I need a new wifi router anyway, and I'll get a free one with BT.
> * It will probably be cheaper once the free UK landline calls and other
> goodies are factored in.
> * They offer lots of free wifi hotspots via BT Fon and BT Openzone,
> which will be of interest to me if I get a smartphone or tabletty thing.
>
> Has anyone used BT Fon? Is it any good?
>
> I have experience of wrestling with BT Broadband customer support on
> behalf of customers -- it's often not fun. But on the other hand, for a
> lot of people BT Broadband is very reliable.
>
> What does the team think? Would moving to BT be a mistake?
>
> cheers
>
> Chris


BT FON/Openzone has by far the greatest coverage for Open hotspots. This is
unmatched by even any areas with WISPs. I have conducted numerous wifi mappings
of numerous towns and cities and can vouch for this. In Winchester alone,
BTOpenZone/FON account for over 90% of the Open access points and have almost
wall-to-wall coverage in both City and residential areas. The speeds of these
FONs for you to use when away from home vary greatly. If you use someone who
is in the sticks on a 2M connection, you will get a VERY small share of their
bandwidth. If you hit an area with someone with a 20mbps connection, you would
see fair speeds. I can not comment for their performance or reliability, as I
never use them.

Im a pure hater of BT personally, but being the big guns they are, they
clearly have more resources. BT have poor customer service and subject their
users to horrid DLM (the case for all 21CN/FTTC users even on other ISPs).

I use AAISP personally, simply because they offer everything a geek needs to
get a decent internet w/ both 21CN, BE & L2TP over a Virgin Media link.

The free router, access to FON and cheaper calls as part of a bundle is a
tempting offer, and is probably the only good things BT have going for it in my
personal opinion :-) - However, go for it. Order it online, or over the phone.
That way you have the Distant Selling Act thing on your side. So if you don't
like it, you have a statutory "cooling off" period.