What to expect?

Ordered infinity 2, install date 15 Jan, one of the first to be installed on this newly upgraded cab.

I did not have to speak to Sky at all (LLU), just ordered with BT then got a mail from Sky a few days later confirming my BB and phone cease on 15th, so all seems smooth there.

Got the ingineer coming on 15th, what will he be doing?

Surely I can just swap over routers and weyhey?

As an aside, I use an Airport Extreme for my WiFi so do not want the WiFi to be working on the BT Box. Is this easy to disable, will I get grief from the ingineer?

You need a proper faceplate for Infinity, a SSFP.

The installer is unlikely to care about your router requirements, but you can always leave it until he's gone to keep it simple.

You could try asking him for an Openreach modem - he may have a spare.

Ok so since I have no master socket (just the openreach grey thingy at the front door), I assume he will install the new faceplate at the closest extension, which happens to be where the current router is.

I have disconnected all other extensions within the house to help boost my speed on normal ADSL years ago.

Unfortunately it appears the internal wiring is aluminium alarm cable so not sure what he will make of that.

BT are sending me a home hub thingy, what is the difference between that and an openreach modem? Why would I want an openreach modem?

WiFi is easy to turn off - as BatBoy says let the engineer do the standard install and then disable the WiFi after he has gone. The homehub has a fairly simple interface for configuring WiFi.

If your Sky was previously FTTC as well then the engineer will do very little.


EDIT : Just seen your follow up post. If you have no master then he will fit a master socket with a faceplate splitter. Should take no more than about 10 minutes.

Edited by ian72 (Mon 05-Jan-15 12:42:05)

The Sky I have currently is just standard ADSL (2+ I think).

In reply to a post by NaNook:

As an aside, I use an Airport Extreme for my WiFi so do not want the WiFi to be working on the BT Box. Is this easy to disable, will I get grief from the ingineer?

I have the same setup, just let the engineer setup the HH5 for wifi, then logon to the hub - and disable both wifi channels. You'll get a orange light on the front of the hub, but that's fine as your AE will take over.

In reply to a post by jroadley:

I have the same setup, just let the engineer setup the HH5 for wifi, then logon to the hub - and disable both wifi channels. You'll get a orange light on the front of the hub, but that's fine as your AE will take over.

........and bin your Sky modem/router.

Is the cable from the "Grey Box" to the first extension accessible? If so, get it replaced with BT CW1308 or Cat5e otherwise you could have problems.

It wouldn't be a straight swap but I can easily run some cat5 once the install is done.

Why not get the installer to do it? This is probably why you're getting an installer if your estimate is 80/20 but you have an external master.

If he is happy to do it then great, but if he doesn't then I will do it myself.

Are they generally amiable?

My only experience with BT engineers is they are generally quite surley and expect you to be thankful they are doing you a service.

The direct BT staff are normally quite good and appreciate a tea & biccies - or at least the offer. The sub-con ones are a different breed !

If you can get the Cat5e in place before, then it will be a nice easy task and will make his job easier as high noise levels/low sync might take him time to resolve. It will be a two minute task for him to punch te cables in.

In reply to a post by Stevenage_Neil:

In reply to a post by jroadley:

I have the same setup, just let the engineer setup the HH5 for wifi, then logon to the hub - and disable both wifi channels. You'll get a orange light on the front of the hub, but that's fine as your AE will take over.

........and bin your Sky modem/router.

Bin it? surely we should be recycling them!

In reply to a post by PS123:

Bin it? surely we should be recycling them!

Not with the users log in details embedded in the firmware!

It used to be the case with engineer visits that they'd also run a single extension over cat5 if that's what was required. I'm not sure if they still do that or not.

As to your existing extension wiring, it would still work, but you could lose speed and suffer from more dropouts unless you are within a couple of hundred metres of the cabinet. However, it would be an unfiltered feed and would require another filter at the extension socket if you wanted a phone service too. What I do is run an unfiltered feed on one pair, and filtered phone to the same extension socket using a couple of other pairs. (The socket in question has both an RJ11 and phone socket). I wouldn't expect a BT installed extension to work like that.

If it's a proper BT engineer, then they also ought to perform some basic line quality checks too. At least they did with mine. The install ran very smoothly. The biggest delay with simply the time taken to run the line quality checks.

In my case, I already had a master and a nearby power socket. I disconnected the extension before arrival and reinstated it afterwards and move the router just to eliminate any causes of delay.