Having been a BT full fibre customer for nearly 18 months, I have been impressed and I have had a reliable service using the BT full fibre 900 plan. Promised upload and download speeds appear consistent. I upgraded to fibre to premises about four years ago after using fibre to cabinet services for nine years prior. Previously, I was on Sky Broadband and then moved to BT. While I was happy with my Sky service, it was increasingly expensive, and it was much cheaper with BT.
A reliable connection is particularly important in our household as my wife and I both work from home. As I am happy to stay with BT and commit contractually longer, I started to look at upgrading the line. What enhanced services could BT offer for a more priority service that could help you restore your service quickly when experiencing issues.
BT offers additional benefits with plans and their Halo 3+ offering caught my eye. Benefits included complete Wi-Fi, to improve your Wi-Fi’s coverage throughout your house, and hybrid connect, which is a 4G backup to keep you going should your broadband fail. It was almost a no-brainer to opt for Halo 3+ as the price was really good. Our current plan was £48, and this revised plan was £55. Just £7 more and many other benefits as well. Additional features included dedicated support, home tech experts when needed and double data on your mobile. It also includes a price promise that you will not pay more than a new customer when your contract ends and renews.
One oddity when attempting to order online was that the BT website kept failing. A “ whoops, something went wrong” message appeared and when searching online, I had no choice but to phone up. This experience was much more positive. While I did have to wait a while, around 20 minutes on a Saturday morning, the gent that served me was excellent. Their security checks made sense and they used technology well. They send a PIN to the contact method they have on file for you and you provide the PIN number to proceed and verify who you are. The transaction was quick and efficient and the chap was very helpful. A gent called Jack and based in Sunderland. A real credit to BT.
The promised equipment arrived some two working days later (complete WiFi and hybrid connection devices) by Royal Mail tracked 24. For any new or existing BT customers who do not have a Smarthub 2, you would get that as well. I turned down the engineer/expert to set up the devices as I could do it myself. That way, I still have a visit for the future if I experience any issues.
Installation was very easy, and you basically connect each piece of equipment directly to your Smarthub 2 with an Ethernet cable and then press the WPS button. The BT app talks you through the process and then helps you position the equipment. While the BT app needs some improvement, it did keep me informed about my order progress as well. The app does have an annoying habit though of constantly needing you to sign in with your passwords.
As we live in a three-storey townhouse, we positioned the complete WiFi at the top of the house to strengthen the WiFi signal. The hybrid connect was then positioned for convenience rather than in the strongest position for best 4G coverage. My office on the middle floor now has this unit on the window sill and still gets a decent mobile connection, and should the broadband ever go down, I will be able to tell if the mobile backup has kicked in.
As my BT broadband is reliable, hopefully it will be a rare necessity for the broadband to go down. However, to test that all will function as expected, I unplugged the Ethernet cable feeding the broadband to the router one evening. Time-wise, it took 3 mins and the backup using the hybrid connect started working. Some tests later, and I was able to keep working. Surprisingly my Sky Stream still worked and the speed on my Mac was good. In the event my broadband does ever cut out, I won’t need to worry about restarting routers etc. I can just let BT and the new hybrid connect work as required.
The WiFi connect benefit of increasing the WiFi signal strength at the top of the house has proved useful as well. The device also has an ethernet socket on the back, which will allow me to plug in a device directly if required. I plan to try that soon and in the event that you need more WiFi connection discs, you can order up to two additional discs. This the offers complete WiFi coverage in your property to avoid any black spots.
My office also has a VOIP internet phone that normally connects to a mains power line through an Ethernet connection. As the second associated power line is connected to the Smarthub 2, the hybrid connect still supported the power lines and the phone connected indirectly through the mobile connection as well. Impressive.
When I ran the test to check that hybrid connect would work, I had read online to allow a few minutes for the mobile network to kick in. When I finished testing, I plugged the Ethernet feeding the broadband connection back in. once a connection is restored, I understand that the router should switch to the fibre broadband though it may take a while. To speed up that part of the process I restarted the router to restore the fibre connection.
Overall, I am impressed. Good service, speedy delivery, easy install and a positive test of the equipment. Should I ever have an outage during working hours, my wife and I now have the security of an unbreakable broadband as BT advertise. Not a bad price for the extra services and piece of mind.
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