Well i live in a flat thats over 400M to the cab and my FTTC gives me 75 / 16 + . The speed predictions tend to be a bit on the low side for FTTC.

Why not go for option 1 initially, get a HG612 modem off eBay (if you get the ECI modem when the install is done), load the custom firmware and check the attainable rate. If you think the attainable is worth it, upgrade to option 2.

In reply to a post by Spasch:

Why not go for option 1 initially, get a HG612 modem off eBay (if you get the ECI modem when the install is done), load the custom firmware and check the attainable rate. If you think the attainable is worth it, upgrade to option 2.

Apart from the extra hassle and work required, BT will charge an extra £25 to activate Option 1, which I doubt I'll get back if I upgrade!

Ah, I see.

MHC I am not convinced on that the pairs will be together all the way from the cabinet.

eg. on a D side swap the dropwire isnt changed, its changed elsewhere, so its possible for adjacent pairs on a dropwire to not be adjacent in the ducts.

They may not be, but the point is that by the time they get to the building any cross talk will have occurred between various pairs in cable bundles and the signal levels will be so low that the chance of any occurring between pairs whether or not they have been adjacent before will be minimal.

stories I have read say otherwise.

I had Infinity installed on Monday. The engineer told me the speed on my line was 59 Mb/s down and 17.5 Mb/s up. That would be what my neighbours were predicted to receive and what I would expect given the cabinet location. However, I noticed he and his mate seemed to discuss seeing lots of CRC errors, although they didn't say anything about this or its impact on speeds to me.

When I run speed tests, I'm getting pretty consistent results of 55 down and 9 up. This is far closer to the original predicted result for my flat. Could the discrepancy in upload speed be due to a high error rate? And if so, is there really any point in contacting BT to complain about not getting the promised 17.5 once the two week settling in period is over?

Also, am I right in thinking that Infinity 1 limits the sync speed to 9 Mb/s upload, so the large number of CRC errors would mean I would only get around 5 Mb/s on the cheaper service?

In reply to a post by jrawle:

When I run speed tests, I'm getting pretty consistent results of 55 down and 9 up.

If you have an antivirus, advert blocker or anything of that ilk try the test without it/thenm. This is speaking from personal experience. There is a long running history of users who have 'accused' TBB's speed tester of having an upstream fault. I was one of them until I discovered that closing down (not just disabling) my ad-blocker fixed the problem.

Also try other speed testers. Oddly, speedtest.net was mostly immune to the problem and it's always good to have a selection of testers rather than relying on just one.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

If you have an antivirus, advert blocker or anything of that ilk try the test without it/thenm. This is speaking from personal experience. There is a long running history of users who have 'accused' TBB's speed tester of having an upstream fault. I was one of them until I discovered that closing down (not just disabling) my ad-blocker fixed the problem.

Also try other speed testers. Oddly, speedtest.net was mostly immune to the problem and it's always good to have a selection of testers rather than relying on just one.

Most of my tests were with speedtest.net. I always achieved the max upload speed when on ADSL. I do have an ad blocker installed, so will try it without that to eliminate that possibility.