BT Infinity

[The Brewer]

Well I saw the signs on the telephone boxes and today I got a call asking if i want to upgrade.

Do I ? I don't know?

I have three megabyte hungry kids and a wife with a Photobucket upload habbit, but I seem to be okay with our 3mbps download and .12 upload.

I download the odd bit of naughty sport and we seem to get by, its just this Infinity is x20 faster for a minimal upgrade....what could I do with it???

Mrs B would think I'm a internet god with the ease she could upload HD pics and the kids would relish 59mbps for Youtube/Nickleodeon/Disney/Google heaven

Any thoughts from the CC community

 

[MrJamie]

I've been on it for just a few months, but the full fibre (FTTP) version as we're kinda in a test area, recently got upgraded to a rather ridiculous 320mbit down, 20mbit up.

It's not as significant as the upgrade from dial-up to broadband, but its still very good if you've got multiple users who want to stream tv, upload/download without slowing eachother down and the latency for gaming is a little better too. They'll probably quote you option 1 prices, but you'll probably want option 2 to avoid the 40gb usage limit and for the extra speed, so check their pricing. Also if you're not already on BT, its worth noting they restrict p2p downloading at peak times.

I definitely think it's worth it and it seems to work really well, a little bit on the pricey side, but then I remember paying per minute on dial-up and racking up huge bills for a less than a 1000th of the connection speed.

 

[GordonB]

40 Gig limit? No use to me then, download pattern in our house has been higher than that for at least a year. I remain sceptical at this practice of advertising and promoting ever higher download speeds whilst at the same time placing a ridiculously low cap on the contract. Currently I'm with Zen Internet, not cheap but they are at least completely transparent and realistic with download limits. I have 200 Gig per month to play with, unused capacity cannot be carried forward but you can buy extra on an ad hoc basis if you need to. I've never needed to buy extra but usually hit 100 Gig depending on how much time the other three members of the family spend on YouTube. Zen also don't do traffic shaping so p2p is useable all day without limit. Speed also remains constant all day, unlike my experience with the Nildram who were taken over a couple of times and who eventually traffic shaped so aggressively that at peak times about all you could do was send emails whilst waiting for pages to load.

I'm not sure if a blisteringly fast connection would increase our useage but I'd happily pay extra for 320Mb, beats my 6Mb connection by more than a bit! Not likely to be available round here for a while though, we are in darkest Suffolk with about 1km of copper to the exchange. Still a mystery to the BT engineers why we get such a good quality connection but the overhead cable was completely replaced a couple of years ago. Doubt they'll be installing fibre in a hurry.

Obvious point to the op is, don't just look at the speed, consider the useage cap as being just as important. Check your account details, most ISPs have a facility to allow you to check historic useage. If I was able to to get a truly high speed connection I think I'd want to make sure the limit was at least double what I'm downloading now to allow for the additional useage that would inevitably occur.

Gordon

 

[Over The Hill]

BT are a useless bunch. I would not have any connection with them even if it were free.
Try getting a fault sorted out.

 

[Mr Haematocrit]

Any thoughts from the CC community

BT infinity is not 'proper' cable its only fibre to the cabinet in the exchange and from there its the same old copper. You have the same shitty BT contention ratio's and other things which limit the speed. The speed claims are in line with the usual BT marketing, they state 'up to' 8x faster than the UK average... try to get them to guarantee a speed, any speed.
If all your neighbours are on infinity and hitting it hard, the contention ratio at the exchange still means your speeds drop.

 

[phil_hg_uk]

I have Plusnet fibre I had it installed 2 weeks ago and I get 36mb Download and 11mb Upload and so far it is excellent, much better than the 5.5mb broadband I did have and with the phone and Broadband combined it only cost £2 per month extra to goto fibre. I get 40gb monthly allowance but I can raise that to 250gb for about £4 extra but so far I dont need it.

 

[MrJamie]

BT infinity is not 'proper' cable its only fibre to the cabinet in the exchange and from there its the same old copper. You have the same s***ty BT contention ratio's and other things which limit the speed. The speed claims are in line with the usual BT marketing, they state 'up to' 8x faster than the UK average... try to get them to guarantee a speed, any speed.
If all your neighbours are on infinity and hitting it hard, the contention ratio at the exchange still means your speeds drop.

The copper is much much shorter, to the new street cabinets rather than all the way to the exchange, so if you live a long way from the exchange and get a poor ADSL connection, you're likely to see the biggest improvement from Infinity fibre and so most people also end up getting much closer to the advertised speed. By its own nature its only offered to people who live right near a fibre cabinet, unlike broadband which was offered to everyone including those living a long way from the exchange or on long/poor lines. I've had no trouble with contention of any sort either, probably because everything downloads so quickly your connection is essentially idling the entire time. Theres also the two versions of Infinity, the "proper" fibre cable on mine terminates about 2 metres from my desktop, no copper whatsoever, definitely worth getting when its available more widely if install price isnt ridiculous

I hate to defend BT, their customer service is terrible and if you're unlucky or try to move/cancel an order youve got a good chance of regularly calling India for the next month, but the connection on infinity is awesome. It's just always fast, digital downloads for games or software for example of 3-4gb usually come down in under 5minutes. I was thinking the other day how itll soon become more like water or electric, where noone even looks at speed because its always more than enough.

 

[The Brewer]

It seems like its out of my hands now. Mrs B has put her foot down and demanded we get it as she's fed up of waiting for her large photo images to upload.
As she said I'm always watching catchup TV through the playstation and it does lag a bit when we're all home in the evenings.

Thanks Sean

 

[Norm]

The speeds below are not achieved through BT...

We're 9km from exchange, so the best we could get through phone lines was 0.5mbps. We went with cable last Christmas and I don't think its an exaggeration to say it has changed a fair amount of our lives. We went from just being able to use one connected machine (if i was web-browsing, my son's Xbox was unplayable live) to having two laptops and two tablets in fairly constant use, iPlayer and other on demand services used most days as well as smart phones using WiFi rather than 3G... etc.

 

[The Brewer]

No cable in our area, so Virgin media and the likes are sadly not an option

 

[GordonB]

Spent yesterday at a mates house in Sutton, Suffolk which is ruddy miles from the exchange and he has always had the most dire connection you can imagine. In the days of dial up he was lucky to even get a connection and for years his broadband speed has been between 0.1 and 0.5 Mbps. As of a few weeks he is getting about 12 Mbps as are his neighbours because BT have installed a microwave relay system on a trial basis. Hopefully it will in time morph to a permanent installation, not quite fibre speeds but for those of us in the sticks it's probably the only way to get a halfway decent speed.

Gordon

 

[MrGrumpy]

On BT Infinity, had it for 2yrs now, don`t think I could downgrade again to normal ADSL . Currently get 40 down 10up which is more than adequate .Very well connected we are with 3 laptops and tablets along with Xbox live. Not a blip from it just works, however its pricey so going to phone up and see if i can get it cheaper (Sky are offering a cheaper deal)

 

[marinyork]

There are some quite innovative community broadband projects knocking around the UK e.g. Robin Hood's Bay in North Yorkshire, it's just that the national media either is unaware of them or not particularly interested. I think there is a tendency to talk about 4G trials for rural broadband as if it is some panacea for rural broadband. There are also plans (plan being the wrong word in some senses) for every county to 'sort out' broadband. Unfortunately this is quite hit and miss and it's been a vastly slower and less 'competitive' process than the government (and bumbling regulator) hoped. So for example that Rutland has a decent plan.

There are other things too. For example my county South Yorkshire has another fibre scheme going. No, it isn't BT infinity, no it isn't virgin media aka cable. It is another fibre scheme. Yes, really. The idea is to cover 97% of the county (and although the county does have several big population centres the 97% covers an awful lot of smaller places). Unfortunately they are making the same mistakes cable made in the past and virtually no one knows about it and I think the company doing it may lose money. People on it around here are getting insane uploads on it of 15 or even 25Mbs.

The problem with what is now known as virgin media is that apart from a relatively small number of new builds, their network hasn't changed much in very many years. It covers about 55% of the UK population. BT infinity will cover something like 75%. If you look into the really detailed bits of infinity, it's a complete myth that infinity won't ever be coming to various 'rural locations'. There are quite a few 'rural' ones already. It will be slow I'm afraid, but it'll be a bit like ADSL where people became 'aware' of it a couple of years after it arrived.

Unfortunately access to superfast broadband doesn't necessarily equate to uptake. Northern Ireland has incredibly high availability rates of such services, but the uptake of broadband services is quite similar to many other bits of the UK. This may change slowly, but I have my doubts. Unfortunately Scotland, bits of Wales and bits of a few English counties (fewer than people think) get completely shafted.

If I didn't have virgin, I'd get either the local fibre service or infinity. So I'm glad Mrs Brewer made you get it .

 

[marinyork]

The copper is much much shorter, to the new street cabinets rather than all the way to the exchange, so if you live a long way from the exchange and get a poor ADSL connection, you're likely to see the biggest improvement from Infinity fibre and so most people also end up getting much closer to the advertised speed. By its own nature its only offered to people who live right near a fibre cabinet, unlike broadband which was offered to everyone including those living a long way from the exchange or on long/poor lines.

Broadband was not offered to all on an exchange at all. I think you're memory is playing tricks on you . To be brief there were much the same arguments now about infinity with the same content, hope, disappointment and rancour with ADSL back then as there is now. The reason I mention this is I think it's instructive and we can learn from history.

Can't get infinity? Your cabinet may be upgraded. Can't get infinity even after your cabinet has been done? May be able to get BT faster broadband. Then there are things like sub-loop unbundling and all kinds of wonderful schemes in the BDUK stuff mentioned above about Suffolk. Hell even the tiny number of poor sods on the exchange activate stuff will get sorted through 21CN or other things eventually. People are generally far too pessimistic on broadband exaggerating timescales and saying they'll never get something. It's not like that at all. On the other hand V for Vengedetta is correct in that the plans for FTTC are not ambitious enough and in 5-10 years time will be regarded as a gigantic folly with the same bitter arguments now about broadband speeds. We might have to do it all again. Sound familiar?

 

[MrJamie]

Broadband was not offered to all on an exchange at all. I think you're memory is playing tricks on you . To be brief there were much the same arguments now about infinity with the same content, hope, disappointment and rancour with ADSL back then as there is now. The reason I mention this is I think it's instructive and we can learn from history.

Can't get infinity? Your cabinet may be upgraded. Can't get infinity even after your cabinet has been done? May be able to get BT faster broadband. Then there are things like sub-loop unbundling and all kinds of wonderful schemes in the BDUK stuff mentioned above about Suffolk. Hell even the tiny number of poor sods on the exchange activate stuff will get sorted through 21CN or other things eventually. People are generally far too pessimistic on broadband exaggerating timescales and saying they'll never get something. It's not like that at all. On the other hand V for Vengedetta is correct in that the plans for FTTC are not ambitious enough and in 5-10 years time will be regarded as a gigantic folly with the same bitter arguments now about broadband speeds. We might have to do it all again. Sound familiar?

Oops, I knew not everyone on an ADSL exchange could get it. I just meant that in general there were a lot of people getting poor ADSL speeds and BT couldnt accurately predict speeds prior to install and was offered way under max speed, but on Infinity if you can get it you're very likely to get it full speed. V was saying that it was the same copper to the exchange so same problems, I was just saying that for quite a lot of people who were on poor ADSL speeds if they can get Infinity itll be a big improvement.

Shouldnt the FTTP on demand offer an answer to some of the people who currently cant get a decent ADSL/FTTC connection?