BT Total Broadband Anywhere review

BT's Total Broadband Anywhere package is an attempt to give you internet access wherever you are. For £30 a month you get a BT Home Hub, a BT ToGo mobile handset and 8Mbit/s BT Broadband.

The Home Hub consists of a wireless router and cordless DECT phone - the BT Broadband Talk handset - which lets you make calls using VoIP. Calls over Broadband Talk are cheaper than standard BT rates: calls to UK landlines are free at evenings and weekends, and international calls cost just 1.25p to many Western European countries. The ToGo mobile phone comes with 50 minutes to any network at any time, and you can buy extra minutes and texts. Once you run out of texts and minutes, call charges are similar to prepay mobile phone charges.

The ToGo is a rebadged HTC S620 smartphone, which runs Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition. It's slim, with a fairly large screen and rubber back, so is comfortable to hold. It has a full QWERTY keypad, and its keys are far enough apart to make typing with your thumbs easy. The phone can send and receive email from your BT Internet account, and it's easy to set it up for common email providers such as Yahoo! and Google Mail. Our Google Mail account worked fine at first, but then stopped connecting. We tried a hard reset of the phone, but this deleted all the customised BT software.

BT has installed its own home screen on the phone, which gives you easy access to the wireless and BT Talk settings, as well as email. You must connect to your broadband router manually the first time you use it, but the phone then connects automatically when in range. When the phone is connected to your router, you can use BT Broadband Talk to make calls. We found the battery drained quickly if we left the handset connected to our wireless network. The included high-capacity battery helps, but we recommend switching wireless off when you go to bed.

The ToGo's standard Windows Mobile web browser works well enough, but the phone has only GPRS rather than 3G data. However, you get 500 minutes of internet access per month at BT Openzone hotspots. The phone connects automatically to any Openzone hotspots within range, and lets you make VoIP calls.

BT's Total Broadband Anywhere is good value, with unlimited broadband, a mobile phone contract and wireless hotspot access. The ToGo's software has bugs, though, so we'd recommend waiting until these are fixed before you buy.