Aluminium cabling

I currently have BT Infinity 1 and get about 41Mbps download speed and 6 Mbps upload which is okay for my day to day needs at present. However as part of a retention offer a couple of years ago I was offered an upgrade to BT Infinity 2. When the changeover was implemented from Infinity 1 to Infinity 2 I didn't get any performance improvement. No explanation was offered but BT returned me to Infinity 1 and gave me a price reduction instead.
Last Autumn we had a BT line fault which initially took the phone service and then the internet connection. Took ages to fix and eventually a BT Boost engineer came out to get me back to my pre-fault internet connection speeds. The engineer said that as I live on a 1960's built housing estate some of the BT cabling between the Fibre Cabinet and my house was aluminium not copper as it was cheaper and more readily available at the time the estate was cabled. He suggested aluminium cabling and FTTC didn't work that well together.
My question to those forum members who understand the technicalities better than I do is whether it is true that aluminium cabling between the Cabinet and my house will restrict the service I can get and is it the case that I have reached a plateau which won't improve unless re-cabling takes place?

Yep, aluminium doesn't conduct as well as copper. Back when it was installed, the internet wasn't really a thing, let alone the high speed technologies that have been developed since.

Your speeds won't increase any time soon.

In reply to a post by codsallandy:

My question to those forum members who understand the technicalities better than I do is whether it is true that aluminium cabling between the Cabinet and my house will restrict the service I can get

Correct. Generally speaking aluminium has a higher attenuation rate than copper cable.

and is it the case that I have reached a plateau which won't improve unless re-cabling takes place?

At the moment yes, but of course G.fast is on the way in the near future and will potentially give you a higher speed. The cable won't be replaced unless it is actually faulty.

Edited by troublegum (Sat 11-Mar-17 15:37:57)

G.fast is not a solution for customers only getting 41mbps especially on aluminium, until/if the G.fast pods get deployed deeper into the network, such as to the DP.

A couple of years ago Infinity 1 was 40/10

What does www.dslchecker.bt.com estimate for your line?

And it's now 55/10, so when the OP changed back to infinity 1, they'll get what their line can support, up to that.

So there was a performance increase. Or the op is referring to max data rate?

I assume, the OP was on Infinity 1, went to Infinity 2 and was getting almost identical throughput (40mbps vs 41mbps sync) and thus, deemed it not worth the extra money, for a miniscule improvement, so downgraded back to Infinity 1.

Since then, the 55meg cap was introduced.

It will be interesting to see what the dslchecker estimates are

how far from the cab are you -- I would reckon circa 600 - 800 metres