Upgrades to new 55Mbps service

I understand Openreach are going to soon be offering 55Mbps as well as 40/80?, my question is how easy will it be to upgrade?, I believe my line will support around the 55Mbps mark so the upgrade may be worthwhile, but I have only just got FTTC available and it is being installed (40Mbps) on the 11th of Jan, I am hoping the fact I have signed up to a '12 month contract' wont impact on my ability to upgrade when it becomes available?, does anyone know yet?, I am guessing it would be much the same as an upgrade from Infinity 1 to 2 (40 to 80)?.

Edited by deleted (Thu 07-Jan-16 00:00:32)

Same mechanism as upgrades from 40 to 80 Mbps services, as for contracts will all depend on what the retailers want to do.

It is expected to be available to ISPs from Openreach from 16 January. How quickly the ISPs start selling it is up to them.

After ordering BT TV last week I suspect that the product is aimed primarily at BT Retail and PlusNet.

The reason I say that is when I tried to order the UHD TV package I was told I couldn't as my broadband connection was less than 55Mbps. That essentially means that no-one on BT Infinity 1 can order the UHD product. Seems too coincidental that the new product is set at exactly the same speed as BT require users to have for the top end TV package.

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How would it help that? It's a maximum not a minimum, so 54.9Mbps is still too low. Even more so if they continue to apply the lower estimates, independent of actual sync.

It just seems highly coincidental and I am assuming it is to support UHD.

But it won't, according to the rest of your post. Everybody on it will be below 55Mbps.

Edited by RobertoS (Thu 07-Jan-16 10:03:27)

For anyone reading this unaware of this soon-to-be new service (me), here's the original publication from OpenReach:

https://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/updates/briefi...

I'm trying to understand why they picked 55. 60, yes (half way between 40 and 80), but 55? Mysterious.

I believe the actual throughput needed for the UHD channel is 44meg so the 55meg sync speed will be to allow for overheads and some fluctuations in throughput.

Quite why they didn't go 60 is a bit bizarre but I suspect it's also to do with the average amount of people that can expect a reasonable uplift in speed to somewhere between 40-55meg.

It may well be that it only "requires" 54 or a "headline" of 55. BT tend to simplify things for us thicko public - as it is I am only getting around 45 so the difference between 54 and 55 was irrelevant to the call and I didn't want UHD that badly that I could be bothered to argue. I suspect that having a package of 55 running at it's top speed will be enough - in fact I suspect less than that would be fine as I can happily stream both Amazon and Netflix in 4K on my connection.

Speed test wise for advertising it lines up with the Virgin Media 50 Mbps service which can test at 55 Mbps if everything is perfect.

Live UHD - as rare as the winning lottery ticket with the quality settings BT Sport uses runs at a peak of 44 Mbps, still head shots probably less.

Pre-recorded UHD is usually in the 15 to 25 Mbps region.

All down to how its encoded and that getting football pitch grass to look good has been the bane of encoding software for a long time, hence to make it look good you use a higher bit rate

That would explain why BT refused me then - I actually didn't want the Sport but it was the most cost effective way listed on the BT site to get all the channels with HD.

They had entertainment plus at £10 which you have to add £3 for HD. Or you can get total entertainment at the moment for £13 which has more channels and a better box. But, because I don't get fast enough connection I am not allowed the better value package.