BT Infinity Fibre -v- Standard BT broadband

BT Infinity Fibre -v- Standard BT broadband

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Discussion

superlightr

Original Poster:

12,842 posts

262 months

Monday 23rd February 2015
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BT Infinity Fibre -v- Standard BT broadband

As per the title - is it really better? any issues/dropping out etc?

lbc

3,212 posts

216 months

Monday 23rd February 2015
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Is a battery better than mains electricity?

It depends what you want to use it for, or what your service reliability is now.

I have FTTC, but not with BT, and never had a problem in last 15 months, but never had a problem with normal broadband either except for slower speeds.

geeks

9,122 posts

138 months

Monday 23rd February 2015
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Have fibre, have done for years now from BT and its great!

anonymous-user

53 months

Monday 23rd February 2015
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I have had Infinity 2 - FTC i believe - for the last 5 months and have had zero problems so far. Superfast connection - I actually get slightly faster than they said I could get.

I went from 2mbs to 78mbs when switching from copper to fibre. Slight speed increase!

clockworks

5,294 posts

144 months

Monday 23rd February 2015
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I had a few problems initially (got it as soon as the exchange was upgraded), but it's been fine for 2 years now. Went from 7mbs to 39mbs, and the difference is noticeable.

Dr Steve

33 posts

233 months

Monday 23rd February 2015
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I went from a very flaky 2Mb/s to very stable 73+Mb/s with FTTC, both with PlusNet.

Highly recommended.

Vaud

50,291 posts

154 months

Monday 23rd February 2015
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Highly recommended. Lower latency, advertised speed, has dropped about twice in 3 years.

A bit of BT that works.

Complex

514 posts

174 months

Monday 23rd February 2015
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We have two houses on the same street, one with infinity and one with standard. The infinity connection is far better in every respect, no drop-outs, just consistently high speed.

bingybongy

3,858 posts

145 months

Monday 23rd February 2015
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The Infinity HH5 has been a right pain in the arse recently, apparently a dodgy firmware update.
It does seem to be OK now though.
I had 16 meg on copper now have 74 meg FTTC.
The biggest upside being the upload speed.

George111

6,930 posts

250 months

Monday 23rd February 2015
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I swapped from 50meg Virgin to 73meg BT Infinity - BT have a much better network with far fewer bottlenecks and even at peak time I can still stream HD to multiple devices without any hint of buffering. Virgin could never do that and struggled with iPlayer on a regular basis on just the iPad. It's not just your local connection speed to the cabinet or exchange that counts but your ISP's back end connections to content providers and peering points - in this area BT are King and Virgin are an also ran.

BT of the past were incompetent and the worst to deal with but they've cleaned their act up recently.

ffc

606 posts

158 months

Monday 23rd February 2015
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George111 said:
It's not just your local connection speed to the cabinet or exchange that counts but your ISP's back end connections to content providers and peering points - in this area BT are King and Virgin are an also ran.
Interesting comments. Any particular reason why you say this?

George111

6,930 posts

250 months

Monday 23rd February 2015
quotequote all
ffc said:
George111 said:
It's not just your local connection speed to the cabinet or exchange that counts but your ISP's back end connections to content providers and peering points - in this area BT are King and Virgin are an also ran.
Interesting comments. Any particular reason why you say this?
Do you not agree ?

Sheepshanks

32,540 posts

118 months

Monday 23rd February 2015
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We were getting 6mb on ADSL and upgraded to Infinity. For everyday use I can't tell any difference.

There are drops in service now and again - often don't notice but the router stats will say it's been up for few hours when it should be days.

FlossyThePig

4,083 posts

242 months

Monday 23rd February 2015
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One factor can be location. I have FTTC but it's too slow to be called BT Infinity, going from 3meg ADSL to 9.5 meg fibre. My daughter has just gone from 0.5meg to 28meg

MintyChris

848 posts

191 months

Tuesday 24th February 2015
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Its the future. Chances are fibre will become standard for anyone who can get it.

I went from 3mb to 80mb. Wouldn't want to go back.

andy-xr

13,204 posts

203 months

Tuesday 24th February 2015
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George111 said:
Do you not agree ?
I wouldnt agree that they're an also ran, Virgin have sold their links to different types of providers than BT went for. Mobile networks for example, and a lot of data and backhaul to providers. It's a different type of network, didnt need as much overhaul as BT's has, but in residential land it probably looks the same for triple play £25/month jobbies.

THe same thing will always crop up though when looking at FTTC/ELM/whatever it is - how many other people are on that wire and how much priority can you get for what you're paying

ffc

606 posts

158 months

Tuesday 24th February 2015
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George111 said:
ffc said:
George111 said:
It's not just your local connection speed to the cabinet or exchange that counts but your ISP's back end connections to content providers and peering points - in this area BT are King and Virgin are an also ran.
Interesting comments. Any particular reason why you say this?
Do you not agree ?
IME Virgins performance has been more affected by their DPI stuff and local contention than peering/transit. Virgin operate an open peering policy which in theory would make their connectivity more complete (at least in the UK) than BT's selective peering policy. I wouldn't expect either of them to have generic peering/transit bandwidth issues in normal operation.

M4cruiser

3,550 posts

149 months

Sunday 15th January 2017
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Just need to get this off my chest, but BT so-called Broadband is MISERABLE. I'm on supposedly an 8meg line, and I get 0.4. BT say that's fine, the minimum guaranteed speed is 256K.

I've spent much of today trying to sort this out. It's awful. And they want another £7 per month for Fibre, which supposedly goes up to 50Mb. That'll be 2.5Mb then, at the same ratio.



stemll

4,065 posts

199 months

Sunday 15th January 2017
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Been on Openreach FTTC for years and it has been fast and reliable with at most one or two outages though if you challenged me I could not tell you when or how long so clearly not significant. Most of those years were with BT on Infinity and then Infinity 2. For the last year (almost) have been with Uno who use the Openreach backhaul so same connection so far as my house and exchange are concerned. Equally fast and reliable but a LOT cheaper and much, much nicer to deal with.

Have never used the BT router, while I was with BT I used a Draytek and the Openreach modem, with Uno I am now using a Netgear which does not need the modem.

jonnyb

2,590 posts

251 months

Monday 16th January 2017
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Anyone know how to get FTTP, and how much?