BT-Fon

[Big Chris]

Has anyone here used this before? I tried it the other day as the internet connection in my new flat was delayed but I couldn't get it to work. I had to refresh/reconnect about 10 times before the homepage would load, I tried numerous times to create an account but it kept timing out.

I eventually got to the signup/payment page and entered my bank details but it just sat on the timer for 5mins having submitted. I tried again having disconnected reconnected and the same thing happened although this time I left it longer but eventually gave up.

I've just checked my bank account and they've charged me £5 twice! There's no contact details on the website so should I just ring BT and shout at them?

 

[Big Chris]

After 43 years on the phone to every department in BT being passed from person to person I was eventually told that BT-Fon is a different company!

Got their number and they've agreed a refund, sorted.

 

[Scougar]

For others.. what's BT-FON's number?

(BTW.. "open world" are also a seperate company from BT now, so they get to charge you for disconnecting your service nowadays - crazy).

 

[TechFunctions]

After 43 years on the phone to every department in BT being passed from person to person I was eventually told that BT-Fon is a different company!

Got their number and they've agreed a refund, sorted.

That’s pretty crazy! We get BT-FON free with Infinity package seems to work alright, although I would think it depends on the access point you are connecting and how good their connection is. For example if I connected to my nearest BT-FON AP is it my next door neighbours so If he is downloading like no tomorrow or decides to turn his Router off it would affect me...

 

[#Chri5#]

For others.. what's BT-FON's number?

(BTW.. "open world" are also a seperate company from BT now, so they get to charge you for disconnecting your service nowadays - crazy).

Do you mean OpenReach? Which is indeed a seperate company from BT Retail but both (plus others like Wholesale) are all part of BT Group.

 

[Scougar]

lol, yes OpenReach OpenReach charge for the pleasure of disconnecting you when you leave BT. Nice. (Because I left them rather than moving phone to another house).

 

[GhostMjr]

Has anyone ever tried getting a bt-fon router?

What were your experiences and was it any good?

Thinking of getting one for the free roaming internet privvies by sharing my 50mb vm conn.

 

[edscdk]

Has anyone ever tried getting a bt-fon router?

What were your experiences and was it any good?

Thinking of getting one for the free roaming internet privvies by sharing my 50mb vm conn.

all BT's routers act as a bt-fon access point,

you dont need to attach anything to the VM connection, if you pay for the service you will get accessto any fon wireless points..

 

[anything I don't mind]

bt fon and bt openzone use other peoples wifi bt home hubs to resell internet to other people. This is a good reason to always turn off wireless on your bt devices.

When i had no internet i used bt openzone and btfon for a month and it was better than 3g which i found to be useless, but it times out after 15mins so i started idling on googlenews which has an auto refresh. But it still times out eventually. I ended up getting free bt openzone mins because of my down time and it was better than nothing.

 

[TechFunctions]

Has anyone ever tried getting a bt-fon router?

What were your experiences and was it any good?

Thinking of getting one for the free roaming internet privvies by sharing my 50mb vm conn.

Check out the FON Site you can purchase a Access Point which allows people to connect to your internet in return you get free access to all FON access points.

http://corp.fon.com/en/products/simpl/

I would restrict what people can access and trottle the connection if your router can, Otherwise you risk someone connecting to your Wifi and using P2P programs etc.

 

[staylo]

bt fon and bt openzone use other peoples wifi bt home hubs to resell internet to other people. This is a good reason to always turn off wireless on your bt devices.

When i had no internet i used bt openzone and btfon for a month and it was better than 3g which i found to be useless, but it times out after 15mins so i started idling on googlenews which has an auto refresh. But it still times out eventually. I ended up getting free bt openzone mins because of my down time and it was better than nothing.

You can fix this using ping to keep the connection busy (ping just sends a very small amount of data to an internet address and back to gauge the travel time)

Start -> Run -> ping -t -l 0 8.8.8.8 in XP, or whatever the equivalent is in these new fangled operating systems.

 

[staylo]

I would restrict what people can access and trottle the connection if your router can, Otherwise you risk someone connecting to your Wifi and using P2P programs etc.

I think you have control over the allocated bandwidth but that's about it. If you've got a BT homehub etc then BT does not count the openzone traffic towards your monthly limit, but if you're using another ISP with a Fon router I don't think the same applies.

 

[Orcvader]

I've opted out of the BT FON so no one leeches off my bandwidth. However, when I was opted in I couldn't see anywhere to control the bandwidth allocation on the BT HH3? 4mb is already slow for my family...

From the sounds of things it's not worth using FON access points anyway, last time I checked it had an 8gb cap? So much for "unlimited wifi around the country" when we signed up for Total Package 3 .

 

[staylo]

Any Openzone users are limited to 0.5Mbit up & downstream, and it seems to (rightly!) give the owner absolute priority (to the point of throttling back any Openzone users to nothing)

Not aware of an 8GB cap, but it's possible the policy is different for BT owners compared to FON owners. I did hear of BT owners logging onto their own router using the Openzone login for overnight downloading to get around their monthly cap