Is BT Infinity really faster?

treecol

For those of you who have upgraded to BT Infinity from standard BT Broadband, I'm wondering if you find it is really faster?
At our previous address, we went for Infinity from the standard service & I couldn't tell the difference. But saying that our speed before Infinity was pretty good & BT persuaded us we needed it.
Having moved 4 miles up the road & only getting 1.4MBPS, it's often painfully slow. But as we only browse the web, with some pages taking an age to load & watch the occasional Youtube clip, which spends ages buffering, will it help this time with such poor initial speeds?

kwikbreaks

How did you compare the two? On Wifi? if so that was almost certainly the limiting factor.

treecol

We were on Ethernet cable at the last property. So it should have been as good as it could be.
But at this one, we do not have a main phone socket in the room the desk top is in, so it'll be wireless, with one of those gadgety things plugged into the socket, that uses the wires in the house to get the connection (or something like that lol!)
I'd very much like a faster speed, but not if there's no difference & pay an extortionate price whilst being tied into a 12 month contract. Obviously BT say it will be better - but they would, wouldn't they?

JJ_Egan

Faster yes definitely but subject to the limitations of the internet the web sites and wifi .
38 Mbs and about 28 downstairs over WiFi .
Web page like this cannot load any faster than its pushed out from the web server .
Infinity is relatively cheap on the current offers .

Pincher

I get


37Mbps on BT Infinity
11.7Mbps on ADSL2+


But this is because I am ~60metres from the green cabinet, where the fibre ends, so there's only 60 metres of copper wire.




What does the tool say?

http://www.productsandservices.bt.co.../speed-checker

kwikbreaks

If you are talking about speedtests then in the vast majority of cases Infinity will be far faster. In my case I'm about a mile from the exchange and 300m from my cabinet. On FTTC I get ~ 66Mbps down and 17Mbps up. With ADSL it would have been ~ 16Mbps down and 1.3Mbps up.

So what does that mean in practice? Either will stream HD just fine and you won't see a lot of difference in website load times. Where there is a big difference is on large uploads and downloads or if several people are giving it some heavy use at the same time.

For a lot of the summer I use a 3G dongle that tops out at ~ 3Mbps and website load times are not noticeably that much slower than at home. Slower yes but not by a lot and still perfectly useable.

Your quoted 1.4Mbps would be poor/useless for streaming and probably noticeably slower but still useable for browsing. You'll get a speed estimate before deciding and anything over ~ 8Mbps should be quite acceptable for light to moderate use. Using homeplugs to extend the wifi and/or as direct ethernet replacements should overcome most of the wifi issues people see.

Graham1

The thinkbroadband site has a useful table of expected speed vs. cable distance from the cabinet. You need to know which cabinet your line is connected to.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/guide/fibre-broadband.html

treecol

Thank you for assisting. The problem I've also had in the past with BT is they do a speed check when I call & asked about normal Broadband & they say it's up to 3MBps then when the engineer was here he did a speed check saying it was only 1.4 - he showed me the speedcheck website & said only to trust that one. I call BT back & say speed was slow & again they use another speedchecker & deny the engineers use a different one. That's why I don't trust them when they say Infinity will be faster.
I'll find out which cabinet serves us, I was told by the engineer it's only 1/8 mile away.

baza52

I get 43Mbps down and just over 11 up. Its certainly faster than the ADSL connection I had a few years ago.

treecol

Just checked & we are 500 meters from the cabinet & the website is encouraging with the speeds we should get on Infinity. Just done a speed check - broadbandspeedcheck.co.uk was the one the engineer used. That says we get 2.15 download speed & 0.68 upload. Don't understand which one does what but it sure is slow. I guess we'll have to go fibreoptic. I will post an update when we get it to say if it's faster.

forgotmyname

People expect fibre to be an instant fix to everything and it wont be. Unless your current connection is super slow webpages may load exactly the same speed as before. Getting the page a fraction of a second faster maybe nothing compared to how long it tales your browser to display it properly.

Where it does win is the download speed for larger files. I was on 4mb before and 70+ now. Webpages open at a similar speed, The only faster ones are the picture heavy ones and then its usually the web server that slows me down.

But i can download a 1gb file in a couple of minutes easily.