BT Infinity - any good

[Spacecadet]

I personally am waiting until BT have to unbundle their FTTC service and allow other ISPs to put their kit into the cabinets, which I assume they'll need to do at some point.

They already have
Plusnet and Zen both offer FTTC which is rebundled BT Infinity

[TheFaQQer]

No it isn't!, no P2P, or should I say throttled to a snails pace...

What about if you use a VPN?

[vetran]

Fibre can run at consistently high (GB) speeds across continents (with the occasional repeater).
ADSL via copper the signal degrades over a few Km and tops out at a few (2-8Mb) over a Km or so.

FTTC is fibre to the cabinet which is probably max 5kilometres from the exchange. Then its converted down to lossy copper which was only designed to take 4khz voice for the last leg which is probably a few hundred metres. This allows them to share the cost for blowing fibre from the exchange to the cabinets (many of these routes have ducting so its fairly cheap) amongst a few hundred users. If they replaced all the cable from the cabinet to houses it would cost millions.

Remember Cat5 which was designed from ground up to take 100MB has a limit of 100Metres. BT were putting ADSL down 50 -100 year old bell wire. ADSL was trying to run 2->20mb down this old cable over 2-5km.

so 100MB plus fibre to cabinet then the old phone cable to your house.

Changes in your house will be the cover on master socket and an RJ11 to your BT supplied (even with plusnet) VDSL modem you then plug the supplied router in. Once tested I just routed the rj11 cabling through my cat5.

Once BT have connected an exchange fibre to the cabinets they have to unbundle it so Zen or Plusnet will supply via the same cabling. The difference is in the 'backhaul' i.e. the size & quality of the pipe to the internet, the contention ratio (how many users use the same bandwidth), the banks of modems in the exchange (they are pretty specialist so they tend to be quite good), the speed & reliability of the DNS servers, the service & the price.

If it breaks down on the exchange -> premises BT are the ones to fix it but using an alternate isp means they chase BT for you which in my experience is worth extra money.

As I say +net were £28, FTTC,unlimited landline & land line rental. BT were £29.99 at the time. Plus a price match guarantee.

I sound like a +net salesman. Zen are good as well but as not as cheap.

[Freamon]

My experience of Plusnet (indirectly) hasn't been great. They're notorious traffic shapers and their backhaul seems awfully congested at times.

I'd rather get my service from a proper ISP (Bethere) but unfortunately they aren't offering FTTC yet.

[nomadd]

OK, so I get the email in my inbox today that BT are now offering their Infinity package in my postcode.

OK, quick update on my original post, just in case anyone is ever insane enough to use Search in General (for BT Infinity.)

Engineer arrived on time. Good start.

Install took about an hour. New box in house. He was very happy to rewire it to the room upstairs I use as my office (old box was downstairs by the front door.)

It's fibre to the local cabinet - which is unfortunately about 1/2 mile away in my case! Good old copper wire to the house from that cabinet, so I wasn't expecting great speed with this much copper. BT line-checker had suggested 23.8 meg; I doubted that realistically.

Speedtest (and numerous downloads of loads of tv I've missed) shows I'm actually getting a solid 35.5 meg. Absolutely stunned.

Engineer said "to 80 meg, with still copper last leg" will be available early next year. Had no idea when fibre to the home would be available.

So, happy days.

Thanks to all who replied.

[stek]

OK, quick update on my original post, just in case anyone is ever insane enough to use Search in General (for BT Infinity.)

Engineer arrived on time. Good start.

Install took about an hour. New box in house. He was very happy to rewire it to the room upstairs I use as my office (old box was downstairs by the front door.)

It's fibre to the local cabinet - which is unfortunately about 1/2 mile away in my case! Good old copper wire to the house from that cabinet, so I wasn't expecting great speed with this much copper. BT line-checker had suggested 23.8 meg; I doubted that realistically.

Speedtest (and numerous downloads of loads of tv I've missed) shows I'm actually getting a solid 35.5 meg. Absolutely stunned.

Engineer said "to 80 meg, with still copper last leg" will be available early next year. Had no idea when fibre to the home would be available.

So, happy days.

Thanks to all who replied.

Is P2P throttled?

[nomadd]

Is P2P throttled?

No idea. Never use it. However, Web and NNTP from my favorite news provider is flying along full speed without problems, even in "peak" hours.

[gingerjedi]

Race To Infinity And Beyond - League Table for BT Race To Infinity - Fibre Broadband League Table, Leaderboard and Exchange Search

Kin'ell I wont be getting it any time in the next couple of years.

It seems small well organised villages managed to get nearly every (in some cases all) eligible people to vote.

Less than 1% voted in my home town.

[stek]

No idea. Never use it. However, Web and NNTP from my favorite news provider is flying along full speed without problems, even in "peak" hours.

The FTTC cab is just round the corner from me, but I get most of my stuff from thebox.bz, torrent, I could use an anonymiser/VPN but I'm nervous of taking the plunge, getting a good 16mb from Be at moment with no restrictions, and I'd be loath to lose it if it went mammaries uppermost....

Maybe I'll have both? One for business! I was paying 75 quid a mo. for dual ISDN not that long ago!

[d000hg]

The thing I was most impressed when changing ISP was how quickly it switched over - about 2 hours of downtime with no engineer to visit. A few years ago, it took days or weeks!