Well now I've gone and done it!

It's seems BT Retail's 'jump the gun' e-mail the other day turned out to be correct.
OK; the e-mail came through three days before the BT Wholesale checker was updated (a bit of inside knowledge perhaps).

FTTC has now been enabled 4 weeks early (OK; not really 'early' as it should have been last December).

Despite my better judgement I've now placed an order for a new phone line (currently F.O.C) and BT Infinity.
Connection appointment is 1 to 6pm on Monday August 22nd (hope I don't have to cancel it due to a sudden trip away).

So here's hoping BT Infinity doesn't turn out to be a crock of poo.

What have I done? Still; at least with a new line install I can leave my BE connection in place on the old 'phone line until I'm happy Infinity won't be throttled to death.

yep you should be happy with it come the 22nd did you get a rough idea of the speed you will get on the day

Well done Ade - good luck with the install - don't forget to go shopping for essential "engineer supplies" before the day!

I had a planned date of 1st September, others currently have 30th September and I was able to order this morning (probably switched over last night according to our village forum).

I've gone with Plusnet - mainly because my estimate is just under the 15mbps. I checked with BT but sadly they've put the price of option 3 with fibre up to £28. Coupled with line rental it would weigh in at £41.90 - so I've gone the Plusnet route to dip my toe in the water.

Chose the value product at £16.49 for the broadband bit (didn't want to take a punt on a higher line speed and fight for a re-grade with BT later on!)

Edited by cjbell68 (Thu 04-Aug-11 18:33:55)

In reply to a post by Johnct:

did you get a rough idea of the speed you will get on the day

The checker estimates 32Mbps but I'm probably only 160 to 200 metres (cable length) from the cabinet, so I should get full speed (and then some when BT switch profiles - hopefully next year).

i think you will get full speed and i think bt is to switch profiles from october this year alough it could take a few months before we get the faster speeds .

As one of the longer time (longest?) users of BT infinity on these forums - it's brilliant.

In reply to a post by adebov:

The checker estimates 32Mbps but I'm probably only 160 to 200 metres (cable length) from the cabinet, so I should get full speed (and then some when BT switch profiles - hopefully next year).

The checker gave an estimate on 31.6/7.5 for me but I have a full 40/10 sync. I think that I am just under 200m line length too. I paced out the most probable route from the cab ( following an obvious filled trench across the road and the BT manhole covers).

Good luck Ade. I am sure it'll be fine.

Just uploaded a pic of a test torrent download i'm running of ubuntu. As you can see it's running at an acceptable speed. Sure, it isn't megabytes per second but not exactly crippled either - and this is 6.30 on a saturday evening.

http://i.imgur.com/oPiPL.jpg

In reply to a post by orly:

As you can see it's running at an acceptable speed.

Not sure I'd call 3.8Mbps (from a 40Mbps product) acceptable, I might as well have stayed put on a 4.6Mbps BE connection (which also downloads at around 3.8Mbps).

I hope this 90% speed drop is due to you downloading via torrents (which are traditionally rubbish) and not the fact BT have so little capacity their 40Mbps product slows down, during peak times, to half that of an 8Mbps ADSL1 connection!

So much for my theory a heavily throttled BT 40Mbps connection would still be faster than an unthrottled 4.6Mbps BE connection (because it clearly isn't)

EDIT: Starting to think I've made a huge mistake (I'm still in a cooling off period, should I want to back out now).
It's a good job I'm also keeping my BE connection, I could bridge the two together and use BT's 40Mbps product to double the speed of my BE connection to 8Mbps

EDIT2: Just as a comparison; your 40Mbps Infinity connection is downloading Ubuntu (albeit via Torrents) at 479kB/s and my 4.6Mbps ADSL2 BE connection is downloading it from an Ubuntu server at 498kB/s..........Do you still think your speed is acceptable?
http://i.imgur.com/PRgND.jpg

Edited by adebov (Sat 06-Aug-11 20:50:27)