I remember the days of £100/month dial up bills and am glad I no longer face them - though I must (one day) cancel the 2nd line I put in for net use.

On FTTC, I would say the following:

There have been remarkably few unhappy BT Infinity customers on these boards since it was launched. I would have expected more tbh with 400,000+ customers but BT seem to be pulling out all the stops to ensure customers are happy.

I guess the fact that all the installs are done by an engineer helps a lot as it eliminates poor wiring which was the cause of a lot of low speeds with ADSL.

You mention customer service but I suspect that a bigger factor which prevents more people from upgrading is that they don't realise how conservative the FTTC checker is - if it says 40Mbps, you are very unlikely to get less, while with ADSL you could get a lot less when sold an upto 8/24Mbps product.

Its obviously your choice which ISP you want to go with - if you choose another ISP, don't forget you can usually 'schedule' downloads overnight with the right software, even if you are asleep..

If customer service is really important to you, you could also have a look at MHC's posts. I believe he has a 'BT Infinity for business' connection on a residential line which costs slightly more (£5/month?) but comes with support in the UK

I haven't been able to visualise your internal layout but one thing you want to consider (though you may decide this is too much trouble) is cancel the master socket move, book an FTTC install and see if the engineer will move the socket as part of the install when he is there. If not, you could always cancel the install and rebook the socket move. I believe (though do check) you can cancel an FTTC install right up to the point it is actually installed.. but as I say you might decide that this is too much trouble.

Edited by gt94sss2 (Sun 12-Feb-12 17:19:10)

If you want unlimited, just go with BT.

It's not difficult.

Except that, if you read this forum, you'll see a vast majority of infinity users singing it's praises.

Definitely no issues with the Business support - yes getting a problem fixed was a long issue but not their fault - down to Hub build levels, and the support there for the whole of the problem and I did not have to go through the same checks every time.

I have email accounts on non-BT servers and they are in use daily without any problems - one is a pain to set up but that is not BT related.

In reply to a post by MHC:

Definitely no issues with the Business support - yes getting a problem fixed was a long issue but not their fault - down to Hub build levels, and the support there for the whole of the problem and I did not have to go through the same checks every time.

Now that's very interesting. I wouldn't mind paying a little extra for peace of mind of UK business support. I note that it's £5 + VAT per month extra for unlimited, but that's fine. And it's ok to have Business Infinity on a BT Residential Line? What is the BT wifi Hub like on the business Infinity, or can I use my own?

Sorry if I've upset anyone by worrying about BT Residential Infinity. I was just going by various Which? reports talking about unhappy users, but that was on their ADSL service I think.

I've been looking at Zen, but in all honesty I'm not sure it's worth paying that much for a limited service. BT look as though they would be fine for me with the Business Infinity service. Thank you! You've all been really helpful and I can't thank you all enough.

I have Business Infinity on a Residential line - you may need to tell BT that you work as an independent consultant or similar.

You can use your own hub or there will be one supplied by BT. Currently it is a 2wire 2701 but is due to change to a device similar to the Home Hub but with modified Firmware and possibly some slight hardware changes. The 2701 is wirelessG and 100Mbit ports - not an issue for me as feed straight into a Gigabit switch. The New version in wirelessN with at least one Gbit port.

As for unhappy users - probably ADSL, but remember there will be unhappy users of every ISP and what is never shown is the percentage of unhappy users with each ISP.

I would agree. Most people on Infinity are very happy. And remember, there's loads and loads of them all quite recently!

You are in general really only going to see those with problems airing their views.

Even looking at the issues on the BT Care Community Forums, an awful lot is down to people having wireless setups wrong, people expecting more than they could get speed wise etc. Those with genuine problems, and there are some, quite a lot does seem to tbe down to some more generic problems on the network. Looks like some routes around the BT network are misconfigured in some way, or the routers involved can't cope with the load (but I would suspect misconfig, rather than a simplistic load issue). These problems in the main are being sorted out and peoples' problems are automagically going away. Not all, I admit, but quite a lot.

What would be nice is if there is a router problem in the network, it would be good if those running that side of the operatrion would let the call centre folk know, and give some idea of the range of IP addresses etc involved, and then perhaps the responses from the call centre would be a bit more useful.

I now check here before worrying about problems:

http://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/service_status

But, I bet all ISP's suffer from the same problem sometimes -

Still delighted really with my Infinity, even with a couple of glitches. Other than those, it's been ROCK SOLID at 37.5Megs down and 8.8 megs up since connection.

Cheers,

Rob

Edited by deleted (Sun 12-Feb-12 20:15:24)

In reply to a post by CarrieLaw:

I hadn't heard about the outgoing emails problem and certainly if true that would be a dealbreaker for me as I've used Fastmail.fm for years and would want to continue doing so.

They block port 25 outgoing, which is the normal one for SMTP servers.

This is possibly to do with the fact you get a dynamic IP address from them, which makes tracing back to you difficult if your computer gets compromised and starts issuing spam/virus etc. emails. You may have changed IP address several time before anything comes to light.

They do not stop you using mail hosts such as fastmail. The POP3 server is accessible, and you can send using the BT SMTP server with no problem, as long as you set up the General tab with your fastmail email address and the same as the Return address.

However, you may find that distasteful. I do. But I think that reaction is probably illogical. The only thing I can think objectionable in any way would be that using that method shows people who examine your sent email headers that you are using BT as your ISP.

As has been said, you can get round this port 25 block anyway, and continue to use the fastmail SMTP ones.

I just connected a friend who is on Infinity to a service which also offers port 26 to access their SMTP server. Fastmail provides port 25, port 26, and their preferred port is 587.

The first day I tried setting him up it was at the end of a long hard day, and it didn't work. Everything still went out through BT, though incoming was fine. A couple of days later I went back and had it working in 10 minutes. It could have been to do with the fact this was a brand new setup of the hosted email service.

In your case it should just be a question of going into the email account settings of your email client, and altering the SMTP port. Though there's a fair chance you already have it at 587.

Thanks Roberto. I don't use POP email as my email is accessed on 3 different devices - Mac, iPhone and iPad - so I use IMAP. I've just checked my outgoing IMAP ports for Fastmail in Apple Maill.app and it is ticked as "Use default ports 25,465, 587" so it looks as though it should be ok. If not, there is the ability to set a custom port anyway.

One final query, I promise! Do you know anything about the problem some folk appear to be having with streaming from Spotify on BT Infinity? I use this all the time, it's a superb service. Something to do with Spotify using P2P connections and thus getting throttled by BT, even though BT says they are not throttling Spotify? I don't really understand the technicalities behind it.