BT Full Fibre 500

Hi all

I upgraded to BT Full Fibre 500 yesterday and thought I would share my experience in case anyone else was thinking of ordering FTTP.

I placed the order on 31 May online whilst 3 months into a 12 month contract with old ISP. as soon as BT’s website allowed and news of OpenReach engineer’s carrying out customer premises visits from 1 June.

I live in a newly classified ‘Fibre City’ location where OpenReach has run Fibre up the telephone poles to the Distribution Point (DP).

It was a one stage install. Although a connectorised cable should have been fitted the engineer mentioned that they had gone back to using a customer splice point (CSP) with the Optical Network Terminator (ONT) fitted inside. This is because they had issues with the copper part of the cable where the tension springs were squeezing the wire too tight causing too many failures. They are now using EZ bend cable which has a connector fitted at both ends but in my case one end was cut off and fibre spliced to an internal thinner cable at the CSP. The outside cable used is a dual cable which has the fibre part and copper part together in a figure of eight.

Took about four hours to do, would have been quicker but had to wait for the lift van to arrive as the engineer could not run the ladder up a corner for safety reasons.

Very professional and made it look all too easy.

The ONT is the newer Nokia unit, which does not have a telephone jack. Existing copper remains in conjunction with the fibre.

The CSP is smaller than I imagined and is not too obtrusive. The ONT is very small now with no Battery Backup Unit (BBU).

So once the ONT firmware had updated and the Smart Hub 2 did its bit, speeds were a bit haphazard at first but seemed to have settled to around 490-510 Mbps on the download and 70-73 Mbps on the upload.

Using wireless will not give you maximum speed. My phone went up to 450Mbps maximum burst, settling around 400Mbps. And distance from the router makes a difference to the speeds too.

Everything has gone smoothly except don’t get your hopes high expecting the maximum speed unless you are on a wired connection and your system can handle it.

I do note that BT have pulled the Full Fibre 500 service and are only offering Full Fibre 300 or Full Fibre 900. So will see what happens in the future. Other than a financial loss with ditching the FTTC part-way through the contract and the initial disappoint of not receiving maximum speeds on wireless, I am a happy bunny!

Edited by deleted (Thu 25-Jun-20 08:28:47)

Thanks for sharing your experience.

500Mb is still available over the phone. About £47.99 they were offering it to me.

In reply to a post by AyeUp:

500Mb is still available over the phone. About £47.99 they were offering it to me.

That's good to know. Thanks for sharing that AyeUp.

PS123 Nice to read posts like this, Thanks for letting us know and sharing you're experience.

Hi AyeUp

You must have got lucky. I did call BT before but they wouldn’t budge on the £49.99 a month charge.

So in the end, I ordered it through one of the cashback sites who were offering £100 cashback. Will go towards some way of offsetting the costs of ending FTTC early, assuming I get paid of course!

I ended up opting for 900Mb for £54.99 a month which isn't too disimilar to what others have been offered. By the time I factored in the discount and the potential from cash back it was about £40-£60.

My install date is 30/07.....by that point I will have sacked off Virgin Media.

I don't think I need 900Mb......but why not have it?

Either way it will be a game changer for me and streaming thats for sure.

How did you end up with it for £54.99? I called up and they absolutely REFUSED to budge on price, now paying the full price

In regards to OP, hit us up with a speedtest!!

In reply to a post by max1486:

How did you end up with it for £54.99? I called up and they absolutely REFUSED to budge on price, now paying the full price

Was easy to get that price, I didn't even haggle for the price, the £54.99 (inc line rental) was what they offered to me on the phone, I might of been able to knock off a couple of quid, but thought that price was fair.

I have always got a good deal when phoning up at the time of renewing the contract.

Paul

I was still in contract, but with a hefty discount on BT's superfast packages. Got full 80/20 sync and only paying £8.95 a month. I did ask if I could transfer the discount to the new service but alas no. As I say by the time I factored how much I could get from cashback (£155) and the reduced price £54.99 which is £120 saving over 24mths, wasn't much in it.

Being honest its more about the upload for me, as I play games online and co-stream with friends (I'm rather poo at online gaming but I enjoy it) it will allow 4K with very little issue.

I just rang them, on the automated menu saying I wanted to cancel and got me through to someone in the "customer options" team and they offered to me at that price with very little haggling.

Yeah we were in mid contract when I phoned to upgrade us to the 900 package, BT was fine with us renewing another 24 Months at the same price that we were paying for the 300 package.

To be honest I was ready for the haggling LOL like I have done many times now at renewal, sadly none was needed due to I think that price was fair for the speed.

I was also expecting for them to say sorry, but you are a few months in contract, but I never got that and that they were very happy to do the upgrade.

Like I have said before we upgraded so that I can use the faster upload so that I can upload contents faster even after I cap my upload to 100Mbits (leaving about 15Mbits for everything else) while I am uploading stuff.

Paul