Until some horrific customer service just over a year ago, I used to get my broadband from Sky. (In fact, from 2006 to 2009, I worked for Sky’s then subsidiary, Easynet). After evaluating the various deals it seems aside from BT, only TalkTalk and Sky were unbundled at my exchange. Everyone else could only resell a BT product. Obviously I was moving from Sky and I’ve never heard anyone say a good word about TalkTalk. So BT it was. Although the product was more expensive than Sky, I felt it was worth it for the better service. So it has proved. Any issues I’ve had, have been dealt with efficiently and I’m quite impressed that if you say anything on Twitter about slow broadband on BT, “@BTCare” message you to see if they can help. That’s a good customer service measure and makes the customer feel valuable.
It was coming to the end of my 12 month contract and I was going to re-evaluate the situation, when BT called and offered a free upgrade to Infinity, their new fibre offering. It meant a new 18 month contract, but I don’t see that as too bad a thing. Without being too techy, the broadband speed is increased by using fibre optics to the cabinet in the street instead of using the resistance-heavy copper cable. This doubles the potential maximum speed from 20Mb to 40Mb. However that is still affected by such things as how far away you live from the cabinet and the quality of the interconnects along the way. Other issues occur when connecting to devices, but I’ll come to that later….
The appointment to fit the new system was only a week after the call, which I thought was quite good considering a friend of mine is having to wait 7 weeks for Sky to move his broadband from his old house to the new. The engineer arrived in the alloted time-slot, fitted a new master socket that has an integral filter and set up the equipment. Previously the HomeHub2 that I had, was a router and phone all in one, but now on my hallway table, there is a DSL modem, a separate HomeHub3 and I have to use my old home phone. So I’ve gone from one plug to three and a table covered in gadgets. I knew this when I signed up, so for me it’s not a problem, but in some ways it’s a disappointment that it’s not an all-in-one unit. However, it may be a problem to you if you’re already strapped for plug sockets near the master socket.
So after the engineer cleared a line fault, packed his things and left, I was able to start testing the speed. According to Speedtest.net (and others) my connection speed on the old system was 14 Mb using a wired connection. I’m about 200m -300m away from the street cabinet and now it’s 31.96 Mb. So that’s not bad and as the line settles down over the next few days that may change slightly. However, I mentioned other issues, didn’t I? Well thanks to the joys of WiFi, which need to encode and decode the signal back and forth, the speeds I get on my devices are as follows: Laptop 16Mb, iPhone varies between 11Mb & 13Mb and my PS3 is reading 10Mb. Interestingly the upload is about the same on each at 8 Mb, which the same again when measured at the router.
This issue is not particular to BT, it affects all WiFi. Things like microwave ovens have an impact on the quality of the signal and it’s worth bearing in mind that if you live in a flat or semi-detached house, it doesn’t have to be your microwave. Indeed anything in the range of the router can affect the signal. It’s this point that is clouding the overall issue of download speeds. It’s often in the news that people don’t get speeds that the ISP promise, whilst this is certainly the case in part, I wonder if people are measuring it over WiFi and not on a wired connection, therfore getting a lower reading than they should. Afterall, the ISP is only responsible for speed until the point it gets to your router, after that demarcation point, anything that goes on is your problem.
So overall, would I recommend BT Infinity? Given that customer service is a big issue for me, I’m happy to pay the extra for a BT service (it should be pointed out the monthly fee for Infinity is the same as I was paying before). The speed is much better than I got before, but realistically as I was getting 20Mb from Sky, the resultant speeds are only a few Mbps faster than I’ve got in the past. That said, for everyday browsing it’s not an issue and only comes into play really when you’re downloading large files. The weekly round of PS3 demos I downloaded this morning were much faster than before. It only took 2 hours to download just over 2.5Gb of data. Last week, that would have taken about 5 hours. So it’s been worth it – especially as it was free to upgrade !
The speeds are a starting point though and like Virgin has with their fibre network (which also only goes as far as a street cabinet – despite the adverts claims), I’m sure it will get faster as technology develops.
