I wasn't expecting this so quite excited.

I received an email from BT (British Telecom) about their January sale. It said because my contract was soon up for renewal I qualified to upgrade to their newer best package and still save £5 per month.

All it really added over my existing package was their Hybrid Connect hub. This is a separate 4G wifi router that plugs into the existing Halo Hub 2 router and takes over and provides your broadband if the main broadband goes down. It has only gone offline a couple of times in 5 years so I wasn't that interested, but if it would save me money over my existing contract it was worth the upgrade.

On logging into my BT Broadband account and selecting offers it was suddenly listing Full Fibre to the premises as an option. About a year ago Openreach dug up my road and laid fibre cables, and installed the hardware on each of the telephone poles, but that was it. I couldn't find any information on when it was going to go live and could be ordered. I had even checked in December and there was still no news. I'd been staring at the fibre hardware attached to the pole right outside my house all year. 

So anyway, being sceptical I didn't believe it was really available. I clicked upgrade and it offered me all the different options, including the fastest, and it really was £5 cheaper per month (but still expensive compared to many other providers). Order went through and it's booked to be installed on the 8th Feb.

So what will I be getting?

BT Halo 3+ 900 package.

That is their fastest full fibre to the premises package providing 900Mbps download and 150Mbps upload speeds. They also guarantee it will always maintain a speed of 700Mbps. So pretty close to 1Gbit Internet speeds. In real terms if it's running at the full 900Mbps it will download at 112.5MB/s. That's 1GB in 9.1 seconds!

Can't wait. No longer will I need to leave the PC or Playstation online all night downloading games. It in theory could download a 100GB game in just over 15 minutes.

It's also going to make server backups and installs so much nicer.

As an added bonus this BT package also gives you Xbox Gamepass Ultimate completely free!

And although I already have the previous package that came with everything else this Halo3+ package provides, you do get quite a lot.

Halo Smart Hub 2 router
Hybrid Connect 4G EE router
Complete Wifi
Full Fibre
Home Tech support
Keep Connected Promise
Price Promise

The price Promise is interesting because they say they will always offer the same or better deals then new customers. That's good because so often you see great deals only available to new customers.

The Keep Connected Promise means your broadband should never go offline, with the 4G router taking over if the main broadband goes down.

Home Tech Support I wouldn't really ever need. They will send an engineer to the house if something won't work. This also combines with the Complete Wifi promise, whereby the BT App locates any poor wifi spots in your house and BT will give you up to 3 BT Discs that form a Wifi mesh and boost the signal.

I already have one of the BT discs, but wifi is fine everywhere in the house. But I'm using it slightly differently. If you connect a disc to Ethernet it boosts and repeats the Wifi from the disc via ethernet. So I ran an armoured ethernet cable to our garden studio log cabin last year and the BT disc is connected down their repeating the Wifi signal. It works perfectly with full signal strength. It even repeats the same id and password so it's seamless. So I have wifi right dien the 50m of garden to the bottom. Lol.