BT Total Broadband Anywhere review

BT's latest package provides broadband at up to 8Mbit/sec over your landline, a BT Home Hub wireless router with Internet phone, and a BT ToGo mobile phone with WiFi.

Together, these give you access to the web and cheap Internet phone calls whether at home or on the road.

The Home Hub is a new model with a curved design finished in shiny black. It supports 802.11n WiFi for faster wireless access from your PCs, and also acts as a dock for a cordless handset that lets you make calls via BT Broadband Talk. This acts like a second line, but works over the Internet; calls are free to UK landlines at evenings and weekends (though this is the same with some BT landline tariffs), and cheap to European countries.

The ToGo is a mobile phone connected to the Vodafone network. The deal includes 50 minutes (to any network at any time) per month, with charges beyond that similar to a prepay. The ToGo comes with the Pocket Internet Explorer browser, which can load full size web pages, not just those designed for mobiles. However, it only supports the slow GPRS data service, not 3G broadband, which is now available from Vodafone and all the other networks. So web pages are slow to load, and it's not practical to send or receive large files.

The ToGo also has WiFi, so you can connect at much higher speeds to your Home Hub or any BT Openzone hotspot. 500 minutes of Openzone access are included, and you can also make cheap Internet phone calls via WiFi. The phone is meant to connect to hotspots automatically when you're in range, but we found this only worked intermittently, and the phone's software was buggy,losing access to our email accounts after a while. Updating the software eventually fixed this.

The lack of 3G is disappointing, but Total Broadband Anywhere is still reasonable value at £30 a month, reduced to £24 for each of the first three months. Ask if the mobile phone bugs have been fixed before you sign up.

Author: Chris Finnamore