The aluminium wiring is likely to be between the 1960s PCP and your 1960s house only.

The new/recent FTTC ("Fibre Cabinet") for VDSL is linked to the old PCP only, not directly to your house; and will almost certainly be copper and a relatively short, around 10 Metres to 50 Metres generally.

Sorry for delay in posting - been watching the rugby!
In no particular order: distance from cabinet is about 800m; I was on the old 40/10 Infinity 1 at the time of the offered upgrade, I think I used to get about mid- thirties download speed and Infinity 2 did indeed only give me 1 or 2 Mbps more which after the offer period would have been more money for 2 Mbps extra; I am now on the Infinity 1 service on 55/10 maximum; the BT broadband availability checker predicts a clean download high of 51.1 and low of 38.3 or an impacted range high of 41.2 with a low of 25 Mbps.
Thank you to everyone for your informative posts. I got the answers I was after which were that the BT engineer wasn't telling me a tale, that aluminium is pretty useless for broadband and that the service I'm getting is as good as it gets until BT and Government invest some serious money in a 5 to 10 year FTTH programme. Dream on!

In reply to a post by lee111s:

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.

Aluminium cables as installed by the GPO quite possibly have a lower resistance but higher capacitance than copper cables for a given length. The higher capacitance could well lead to a greater loss of high frequency DSL signals.

Housing estate I'm on has alumimum cable,my connection dropped from the estimated 54Mb to 14Mb, no spare pairs, & BTOR wouldn't do nothing.
So, I wrote to Sir Mike Rake & others, & made myself very unpopular, took a few months for things to happen, but I got my line moved to another pole at back of my property which is closer to cabinet,took two days for work to be done,but now getting 74Mb.

I to have aluminium cabling to my housing estate which was built in the early 70's 72 i believe. I currently have sky fibre pro and have to say my sync (72) and throughput speeds (68-69)are good enough for me. Last time i had a engineer visit he showed me the line length on his tablet as it accurately mapped out the route of the cable, i'm only 250m from the pcp cabinet so that probably explains why my fibre is relatively good for aluminium cabling. Also ound it interesting that the engineer said back when they laid these cable they probably didnt put duct work in between the main line and the house so its probably just laying in the ground (yay for corrision)

Edited by RBD (Sat 11-Mar-17 21:36:14)