I've been offered this, but was wondering how useful it is in reality as opposed to 3G. I assume it will be more stable where available, but how easy it is to get it outside?

Some friends told me it would be great, as BT have the system where BT users give up a little bit of their bandwidth to create a comprehensive network, but on further investigation it seems that this is BT-FON and is not included in the Orange package.

Could anyone who has experienced Orange's BT Opensone (BT-Wifi now) package tell me how useful this is in everday life and is it adequate compensation for limited data?

bt openzone/fon is totally crap unreliable, wont connect, slow. just my opinion i have it with my BT broadband option 3

2mb tops.. crap upload. With Orange it's only the Hotspots that are covered not the BT Home Hub provided 'BT Openzone' or Fon thats literally everywhere.

It works if you really are desperate but it's not great, Sky's free wifi is better for example.

Thanks guys. I'm hearing the same from others. Amazing really - you'd think a former national telecommunications monopoly would have the experience and expertise to do this sort of thing properly. Ain't privatisation wonderful.

It does seem Sky's offering is better, but then they bought it ready made from the Cloud, didn't they?

If anyone has any more opinions on BT-Wifi aka BT Openzone with Orange please go ahead and post.

There are exceptions. In the Olympic Park I was consistently getting 25mbs down and up, but then that was a prestige site

Probably the only exception in the entire country

Do Orange customers get to use all of the BT WiFi hotspots including the Fon ones or do they just get access to the OpenZone WiFi hotspots?

BT seem to have two catagories of WiFi hotspots and Vodafone only allow access to the OpenZone ones making the facility of limited use.

Never able to use it in 2 years with Orange - it's a complete waste of time. It hardly ever recognised my password and if it did let me on then you couldn't actually do anything! I only had access to the OpenZone hotspots, not the Fon ones.

I get them both with my BT broadband, and its useless.

No. Orange customers can only use the bog standard BT Openzone ones and not the more useful ones where BT customers give up part of their bandwidth to create a more comprehensive network - i.e BT-FON Openzone. The lesser BT Openzone has actually been rebranded as BT-WiFi I believe, probably in order to distiguish it from BT-FON Openzone.