Openzone/Fon Questions

I'm soon to be a new BT Broadband customer and am looking into the whole Openzone/FON thing and it's all very confusing - I'll come to that in a minute.

1. But first, I live in a rural area and am expecting to get anywhere betwen 0.75mb - 2mb according to BT. I'm under no illusion that it will most likely be at the lower end of the scale. My PC is in a different room to the hub, so I was hoping to use wireless. Would this slow me down even more? Should I get a long long ethernet cable and use that instead? I'm obviously keen to get every scrap of speed I can!

2. I'm considering opting out of BT FON as I suspect this will slow me down even more (when it's going to be slow enough in the first place). Would this be sensible?

3. Also, as I understand it FON is where domestic users allow access to their connection to fellow members whereas BT Openzone is more wi-fi spots in businesses such as airports, restaurants etc. If I opt out of FON do I lose access to Openzone or can you be registered to Openzone but not FON?

Thanks in advance, I must sign up to this site as it seems a brilliant resource.

Try WiFi first if that is more convenient and either compare directly with wired or simply check what you get against what your IP profile gets set to. WiFi can potentially be slower for sure.

FON will use your bandwidth but only when somebody is connected. As you live in the sticks that is likely to be never - I have an add-on FON router and to be friendly even connected an external antenna I had to hand - a year on the only person to ever connect to my hotspot is me and I live in a town.

I'm not a BT customer so don't know about OpenZone availability to you. It is separate from FON though - I got some credits when I bought the FON router.

Provided you have a decent wireless signal then you should not notice any slowdown in teh ADSL link speed. Even a basic 802.11b will give 11Mb.

As for using providing access to others - how close is any other property or road? Will anyone realistically use it? If you believe it will be NO, then stay subscribed as you will get free access when you are away from home. You can always opt out later on.

One other point: m - milli or one thousandth, M- Mega or one million Your speed will be 0.75 to 2 Mb (Mega bits). Similarly b- bits, B- bytes.