BT Broadband Talk review

BT's Broadband Talk service lets you make cheap telephone calls over your broadband connection.

BT offers two subscription packages. The Evening and Weekend Plan costs £2.99 per month and gives you free local and national calls in the evening. The Anytime Plan costs £7.99 per month and lets you make free local and national calls all day. There's a 99p discount on both packages if you're a BT broadband customer. All free calls are limited to an hour in length.

The service comes with a Voyager V10 telephone adaptor that converts your standard phone into a VoIP one, and this plugs into your broadband router. If you don't have a router, BT can supply a voice router instead of the V10. It also connects to your standard telephone line, so you can still receive calls on that number and it switches to your standard line in the event of a power cut.

Configuration of the router is via a web browser, but you have to use Internet Explorer (not documented), as Firefox doesn't work. Once configured, your telephone works as it did before, only calls are routed over the internet. However, if you want to use your standard land line, you can dial the prefix 5. Call quality was very good, and it's hard to tell the difference between a VoIP and a standard PSTN call. It's not documented, but you can connect to the V10's management web page and increase the call quality bit rate from 40Kbit/s to 106Kbit/s.

Broadband Talk gets you a new 05 telephone number, which is the dial code reserved for VoIP phones. We found we could dial our new number from most phones, except mobiles on T-Mobile, where we got an "invalid number dialled" message. Several mobiles in our office were also set up to bar calls to this number, so you'll probably need to give out your standard telephone number for incoming calls. Other voice providers, such as Vonage and Sipgate, handle things better by allowing you to choose a standard dialling code and telephone number.

Broadband Talk's call rates are competitive compared to BT's standard rates, with calls abroad costing from 1.25p per minute for the major developed countries such as the USA, Australia and most of Europe. Mobile rates are the same as for BT Together, but they are competitive. It's strange that landline calls are so expensive, at 3p per minute, compared to Sipgate's 1.19p.

It's also a shame that BT doesn't offer free phone calls to other Broadband Talk customers, as these calls are charged at landline rates. Vonage offers free worldwide calls to any of its customers, and you can do the same thing using Skype's PC client.

Broadband Talk is very good value and the international call rates are some of the best we've seen. However, the 05 number is a pain, and the local call rates are expensive compared to other services.