BT Whole Home Wi-Fi

A smart and easy way to upgrade your home’s Wi-Fi, but the price is a little high

- David Ludlow

VERDICT 

A smart and easy way to upgrade your home’s Wi-Fi, but the price is a little high

GETTING FAST AND reliable Wi-Fi all over your house used to be incredibly difficult, but times are changing, with a spate of whole home wireless products coming out. These products give you multiple wireless access points, linked together in a wireless mesh network, so you get coverage exactly where you need it.

The first product we saw was the Netgear Orbi (Shopper 348), and now it’s BT’s turn with its unimaginatively, yet highly descriptively, named Whole Home Wi-Fi. What’s different about this product, compared to the competition and rather unusual coming from BT, is that Whole Home Wi-Fi doesn’t have a router. Instead, you should see it as an upgrade kit for whatever router you happen to have at the moment. Once installed, BT’s kit provides wireless access for your house, while your existing router takes care of dishing out IP addresses and your internet connection.

With the Whole Home Wi-Fi kit, you get three identical access points, which BT calls discs due to their circular bodies. Each disc is just 165mm across and sits neatly on the integrated stand, making them easy to position anywhere. Around the back, there’s a wall-mount slot that would take a screw head, but the fixed stand makes this impossible to use. BT has advised that the discs are not wall mountable.

WELL ROUNDED