Some acquaintances had BT Broadband (ADSL), and were upsold to Infinity by a keen salesperson on the phone when FTTC first arrived in their area... but they really don't need it, they're just round the corner from the exchange and their speeds beforehand were more than OK for them. The 12 or 18 month contract (whatever it was) has run its course.
Their usage is fairly light, but they do have visitors to stay who can push the usage up and they're on a capped Infinity 40GB usage plan rather than an unlimited one (costs £5.60 per 5GB or part thereof if you go over).
I think they'd be better off on a cheaper ADSL package with unlimited usage. It seems likely that it would be easier to downgrade from FTTC to ADSL by staying with the same provider, in their case BT, at least initially (then after the 12 month contract is up they'd have the opportunity to swap).
There doesn't seem to be an established downgrade path from FTTC to ADSL with any of the providers, and attempting to swap provider and do this at the same time seems like a recipe for disaster! They wouldn't want any significant interruption in service, i.e. really anything more than a day.
Would they have to pay the FTTC cease fee? I note from www.bt.com/ceasecharge that BT's cease charges changed on 20 September, to £5.50 for Infinity customers and £31 for ADSL customers (presumably the lower cease charge for Infinity is because Openreach no longer remove the jumpers to the FTTC cabinet as a matter of course but rather now leave them in place?). But I just wonder if there might be some other regrade / downgrade fee to pay that I haven't come across.
Edited by binary (Sat 26-Sep-15 12:49:46)