Considering BT - comments please

I'm interested mainly in Infinity as my local cable is well oversubscribed but that won't be available until June at the earliest. My house should give me 15Mbps+ but the line had a fault which they never fixed (5 visits) and which drove me to cable. Even with the fault the speed wasn't bad but it wasn't 100% stable - I was on O2 so there was no DLM but I think the BT DLM may well penalise me.

So - if I take BT's ADSL how well will it perform (dodgy line aside) - I know that years back BT had a very poor reputation with massive evening slowdowns - is that still the case?

Will I automatically be upgraded to Infinity when it becomes available? Would I be better taking BT now or waiting until Infinity is available and just ordering it direct.

Upgrades to Infinity are NOT automatic.
Evening slow downs - don't recall a lots of moans about this lately.

Thanks - so it looks like I may well be better off putting up with cable until Infinity is available then?

Where was the line fault? You probably don't know.

It is was between cabinet and exchange than it will not affect delivery of VDSL just voice (if it was a problem). If it is between you and te cabinet then the technician doing the install should be able to sort that issue out.

No I don't know because BT didn't find it - if they had they'd have fixed it I'm sure.

I'm hoping that as only the last leg is used for Infinity it could bypass the fault. Actually there is the leg from the cab to the base of the pole, a short one up the pole, then finally my drop cable plus a joint and internal cable to my master socket. A new drop cable was fitted and one engineer said he remade the joints at the bottom of the pole. Another one said he swapped the pair from the cab to the pole and yet another said he swapped the pair from the exchange to cab.

If they were all telling the truth the entire line was renewed or swapped out yet it still had noise on voice if the ADSL router was running (definitely not filters as apart from the filtered faceplate being fine at the previous house I also tried a couple of different plug in filters and nothing fixed it.)

The last BT engineer said it needed reporting through O2 to get an ADSL engineer out. Their dorks increased the target margin to some ridiculous level - quite how they thought that would help noise on voice I don't know - all it did was reduce my sync by a goodly amount. It was obvious to me that I'd face an uphill battle trying to get them to call out BT and as a good VM cashback deal was ending I binned ADSL completely and went to cable.

Once I get Infinity I'll check if the voice is OK or not - with no ADSL signal on it used to be OK but the HR DIS fault made voice very bad at times if the router was turned on.

If the voice is duff but Infinity good then I'll just carry on with my Vonage VOIP which I use on VM because their phone charges are far too high. If the voice is OK I'll dump Vonage and take a BT call package assuming they are cheaper.

What I don't want is another round of blokes with muddy boots failing to find a fault.