BT infinity or something else?
 

Hi

My current download speed is about 8Mbps. BT infinity fibre optic broadband is available in my area and estimate from their website checker is that BT infinity should give me 33-46 Mbps.

Is BT infinity the way to go or are there better options for enhanced download speed?

Thanks

Have to say, I have Infinity and it is amazing. Only had it 4 months but no issues so far. You can check SamKnows if you want another speed estimate.

BT are pretty good. I use PlusNet for unlimited downloads and a fixed IP address.

If you can't get Virgin then infinity is your best bet, I myself am lucky and have 160mg Virgin, and it's been great for the 6 years I've had the connection, it does go down sometimes but so did Adsl when I had it, the ping times are very very low, and it loads like mad...I can't fault them

I had Sky that was putting out 1.3mbps, I now have Infinity and am enjoying 38mbps and free BT Sport for the Moto GP! :)

Massive issues with Infinity after install. The Home Hub 5 is utter garbage and drops connection to WAN and wifi all the time. BT engineer gave me an older Openreach modem to connect to the WAN rather than the HH5 and now the connection is much more solid.

They rated my line at 38-52Mb (on the Infinity website which also states the "real" speed will be within 1 or 2 meg of that) so went with the lower plan, I was getting about 23/24 which they said was perfectly acceptable (despite their own tools saying this was below what I should get worst case with an impacted line) :rolleyes: Now I have the modem and a few faults on the line were fixed its now up at about 30mb and 9 up, which IMHO is still crap considering what I was told I would get.

To be honest, for the extra cost I should have just stuck with normal BB.

That sucks, I was quoted up to 40 and I get this;

http://www.speedtest.net/result/4196707231.png

I use virgin and since I got rid or their router and used a descent one I get 160mb download quite often and over 100mb over wifi on my ipad.

I had Sky fibre and was hitting 80mbps. Was a rubbish router that had to be rebooted every few days.

Now on Virgin and get 154mbps :D

Just binned Sky for BT (inc youview) and I'm REALLY impressed with it so far. Getting 80 at the box.

Strange. Quite a few of you seem to be impressed by Virgin. My bro inlaw switched from Sky to Virgin and moans about how bad it is, especially the range if the wifi router.

...and here's me on 1mbs.

That's a separate issue really. You can sort that by getting a better router.

That's why you pay out for a better router as using their stuff I was getting max 30mb and I was nearly going to get rid of it for a third time. I bought the best Netgear router at the time and suddenly I was getting 160m and at least 100m over wifi.

So it seems Virgin is the way to go and uprate the router, they seem to promise up to 150mbps if you're willing to pay for it.

I've checked and there is fibre optic cable in my street, how will they get it into my property?

Thanks

I download using newsgroups and using a paid for server I usually get 140mb downloads but due to having lots of incompletes with Astra web I stopped my payment and tried Virgins news address and it gets over 160mb constantly :)

Steve do u manage to get everything from Virgin news or are there lots of stuff missing, what's url for it....? I might give it a go.

I use newshosting at the moment never fails thus far...

Dig the lawn. But not knowing what your house is like I don't know. They dug my dads lawn etc special drills for concrete couldn't tell they had been really...

Most of the routers provided by ISP's are ****e, I bought a decent Asus router and the signal was epic, I picked it up in my car driving into the car park at my flats!

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...=46&catid=1596

Surely you cant make it faster than what comes down the tubes !

FTTC is the standard fibre optic offering which stands for fibre to the cabinet. This means fibre optic runs from your exchange to your nearest green cabinet. So from the cabinet to your house the connection is your standard copper line. FTTH is what some new homes have if the building company of those homes pays a large price for it to BT Openreach where it is fibre to the home so fibre optic is laid from the nearest green cabinet that is already FTTC enabled to the front of the new property. The last Openreach engineer I spoke to said they had big issues with take up of this though because BT were charging so much the building companies wouldn't pay it. In many other European countries FTTH is the standard and have been getting 100mb+ fibre broadband for donkeys years. We are miles behind here. The US was using 100mb broadband as standard 20+ years ago. That's how behind the UK are.

Virgin is something completely different to fibre broadband is known as cable broadband. This is where Virgin have laid their own fibre optic cabling in streets and is mainly restricted to cities and large towns (or basically where their market research shows they will get a high enough takeup to warrant the cost of implementing it).

And all providers give you the crapiest of routers with weak wifi signal etc. If you want to get the best out of your connection you will need to invest in a much better router.

What 'comes down the tubes' is merely to your master telephone socket in your house, normally the socket by the front door or sometimes in the lounge - basically the nearest point in your house to the road where they can run the cabling to. If you then connect a crap router to that socket or have a load of lengthy crappy internal wiring running off that master socket to other phone sockets all around your house your connection will be heavily impacted as it will if you connect your router to any socket other than the master socket. You can even improve on the master socket connection sometimes when removing it and plugging the router directly into the test socket that sits behind the faceplate of the master socket. The test socket is basically the direct connection to the copper wiring that runs to your house from the street cabinet.

Virgin will only get stuff that's very recent as it only has something like 10 days retention? I recon if your getting stuff more than 7 days old your wasting your time with Virgins news address.


News server : news.virginmedia.com

Cheers steve, I don't get much old stuff to be honest this may save me a few quid...

Wifi doesn't only communicate with the internet you know. Gigabit ethernet and high speed wireless for streaming, NAS etc.

Did you have one of the newer routers?

How did you replace it?, I assume you put it in modem only mode?

Thanks everybody.

Anonomous, a few questions please?

I have a telephone line/socket running into many rooms in the house. This was done professionally and I'm assuming using good quality cabling. Could this be impacting the speed of the broadband?

If that is the case then I suppose it strengthens the case for me to get bb that is not dependant on a phone line ie from Virgin?

I have my router by the main socket at present and I have a network distribution in the loft that sends a hardwired ethernet signal to many rooms in the house via cat5/6 cable.

If I go with virgin, the easiest place to get their cable into my house is into my front reception. There is an ethernet outlet here and my AV guy says he can use that to send the signal to the network distribution box in the loft and then to the rest of the house from there.

It's not the best room to have the wifi router in though. Should the router definitely take the signal straight from where the Virgin cable enters or is it ok to plug it into any of the ethernet sockets?

Thanks for your help

Ding yes to your virgin idea.

bring it in near the window or wherever, get them to drop in their Virgin superhub, then connect 1 port to that socket and your house will become Live.

Now heres where it gets messy, Virgins superb the old one was ****, the new ones may be better, but what i do is put the superb into Modem only mode, its a setting internally that basically switches off all the wifi and fancy router stuff, i then connect the super hub to my preferred model of router in my case a Linksys this then feed the said socket i have or you have.... only reason i do this is because the wifi on the virgin was pretty dire, also if you do my method you can swap and change the router at your own pleasure.

as for your BT socket question id say no, as long as your in the main socket thats as fast as you'll prob get.

so if you take your setup u have now and imagine another router before yours thats it.

You may have to change the BT router though to a proper WAN router with ethernet as the ADSL routers are just that ADSL and probably don't allow a connection to virgins superb or have a WAN port..

There is only one way to answer that and it is to make a note of the current conection speed on the router as it is connected now. Then you could test what speed you get by connecting it directly to the test socket behind the master socket - should just be 2 screws to take the face plate off and there you will see a phone socket which is the test socket. Plug the router directly into that and then record the connection speed on the router and see what difference there is. The difference will be the loss you get through the internal telephone wiring. Hopefully it will be negligible.

Thanks Ted.

So Virgin bb, use their router for modem only and add another decent router. Correct?