BT infinity,

[jasper5]

I keep reading about random outages on the Virgin Media network, and no-one in their customer support has a clue.

1MB after moving house in the sticks. Ah well. Might look into infinity myself. New phone line needed for it?

I get the random outages on VM, but only since they replaced my old modem with the new "Superhub" have to reboot it quite often.

[lozz]

I keep reading about random outages on the Virgin Media network, and no-one in their customer support has a clue.

1MB after moving house in the sticks. Ah well. Might look into infinity myself. New phone line needed for it?

I get the random outages on VM, but only since they replaced my old modem with the new "Superhub" have to reboot it quite often.

inever had a problem with the Vm tbh, not sure on these new boxes mind,ihad the old one, small black hub thing and wireless box,
the Tv packages ithought where a tad ridiculas in price tho, basic package, you can get same channels on freeview,
there line still comes in usefull tho

[sirwiggum]

My mum had the TV package from when it was cabletel.

Had to argue with Virgin Media to get rid of the old slow buggy Pace box and get a new Samsung box.

Even then, compared to Sky, it's like watching TV through a bathroom window sometimes, the MPEG artifacts are atrocious.

[lozz]

Best about Vm youve no line rental,
if you get aproblem with the service they compensate, a months free broadband or what ever,
they dont like loosing customers,

[sirwiggum]

No but then is the phone not part of the TV+broadband package?

I don't think we can get VM out in the sticks anyhow, its just the old CableTel network from about 15 years ago.

I mind back then, a Cabletel to Cabletel call was 5p for however duration.

And those were the days of dialup internet, 0845.

Well a local internet firm had a dialup service, £10 a month or so, then you could stay online evening and weekend for as long as you liked for 5p phone charge.
Of course broadband came along and changed all that.

I also mind we had the phone line up to my room, then there was no wireless networking back then, so I ran a proxy server on my computer which dialed up, then a BNC network to the other 2 rooms in the house to share the internet. Got a bit slow, 56k dialup with 3 PCs hitting it constantly.

[highlander]

Fibre optic, how do they get that part, its a fecking phone line,

It's called "Fibre to the Cabinet", or FTTC. Typical Fibre installations have a fibre-optic connection directly to your office, which is known as Fibre to the Premises, or FTTP.

ADSL broadband's main problem is the length of copper cabling between the telephone exchange and your house - the longer the cabling length, the greater the electrical resistance - the more resistance you have, the greater the signal attenuation, and therefore the lower the bandwidth you end up getting. You only ever get close to your promised 20 Mbit/sec downstream bandwidth if you're right next to the telephone exchange.

Fibre optics don't suffer from electrical resistance; using quality fibre-optic cabling and fibre-optic transceiver modules, you can transmit a signal flawlessly over miles of fibre-optic cabling.

BT Infinity as a home product works using FTTC. With FTTC, you have fibre going from the exchange to the cabinet outside your house, and normal copper wiring going from the cabinet into your house. This means that you have a very short piece of copper wiring between your house and the fibre-optic transceiver, meaning very little electrical resistance and therefore a much stronger signal and much greater bandwidth. It's like pulling your house closer to the telephone exchange.

Does that make sense?

[lozz]

Cheers mate,
that makes sense sort of,

state of the Art cable in the box and stoneage phone line, dont make sense,
ive got the Green cabinet out side my house, so its not like its 50miles away, and yet its slow,
The Wifi dongle iwas using on the 3 pay as you go was quicker, but it lagged now and again on youtube etc, ithought id get something icouid have at least the xbox running on with the pc with half decent speed but no -its slow,

perhaps its my pc idunno iwill kick it and see if that helps

[highlander]

How is your PC connected to your BT Hub router? If you're on WiFi, forget it; you won't actually get 54 Mbit/sec from an 802.11g wireless router, ever. If you're on a cabled connection, then you've got 10 Mbit/sec, 100 Mbit/sec, or 1 Gbit/sec connection to your BT Hub router.

Try going to http://www.speedtest.net and see what your connection actually gives you in terms of performance.

[lozz]

Pc is linked via ethernet cable,
goes from pc to connection Marked GIG E 4 marked on the hub if that Makes sense?
The Bt chap also wired up a 2nd box, Dont know why tho?

so ive got The infinity box, Which looks Massive on Tv, (its only small thing with 3 lights on PWR /Broadband/wireless)
And this white Thing with Open Reach wrote on it, looks like its been bought from the Quid shop, Thats connected Via lan 1 so as guess that Goes to the Main connection box, phone line /adsl box,.

was thinking of taking the White box off see if the strength picks up,
The white Box is also running hot

[lozz]

Speed test came up with this, http://www.speedtest.net/result/1980870970.png

[highlander]

Pc is linked via ethernet cable,
goes from pc to connection Marked GIG E 4 marked on the hub if that Makes sense?
The Bt chap also wired up a 2nd box, Dont know why tho?

so ive got The infinity box, Which looks Massive on Tv, (its only small thing with 3 lights on PWR /Broadband/wireless)
And this white Thing with Open Reach wrote on it, looks like its been bought from the Quid shop, Thats connected Via lan 1 so as guess that Goes to the Main connection box, phone line /adsl box,.

was thinking of taking the White box off see if the strength picks up,
The white Box is also running hot

I've never seen the home product (it's not available on my exchange, and nobody I know has it).

We just had a business product installed for a new office we're taking over in Cornwall; they called it BT Infinity for Business (or alternatively, BT Total Business Broadband Fibre). Apparently it's exactly the same damned thing as the home product, but with certain perks for business users.

What they installed was a small, unmarked, white box - this is the "terminating box". This is where the fibre comes in to from outside the building. This connects into a larger white box with Openreach on it - this is the "optical terminator", and it acts as a media converter between fibre-optic cabling and RJ45 Ethernet. Then you connect your router - either the supplied BT Hub product, or your own router (i.e. Cisco, NetGear, etc) into the RJ45 Ethernet port on the optical terminator box using a normal network patch lead. We were told that the terminating box and the optical terminator are absolutely essential, leave them alone, but that we were free to use whatever equipment we wanted connected to the optical terminator. So we used a Cisco 891 VPN security router (these are great, but a good bit more expensive than your average home broadband router product).

I don't know exactly what they install for home users.

I am told that it can take a while for the Infinity line to "train up", meaning it could take a few days for you to get the full speed your connection can offer.

Infinity is also sold in three different options:
Option 1 provides up to 38 Mbit/sec downstream and up to 9.5 Mbit/sec upstream.
Option 2 provides up to 76 Mbit/sec downstream and up to 19 Mbit/sec upstream.
Option 3 (not widely available yet) gives you up to 100 Mbit/sec downstream and up to 15 Mbit/sec upstream.

The business packages give higher speeds - their premium package promises more than 300 Mbit/sec downstream, which is just silly.

If you're on Infinity Option 1 then that Speedtest.net result isn't bad - check it every few days or so and see if it improves. And hell, I would never call that slow - I get just a bit less than 9 Mbit/sec downstream on my ADSL broadband, and about 768 Kbit/sec upstream. That's positively glacial in comparison.

If you think that your line is slow, you could have other issues - packet loss, for example; if you're getting packet loss, then TCP/IP will need to retransmit the dropped packets, causing a perceptible slow-down in the connection. That's just one example though. If it's really terribly slow, I'd call the BT Infinity service desk and see if they can work out what's wrong.

[lozz]

Thanks mate,

ithink my pc might be the problem, Tried putting windows 7 back on it last night got half way through and it gave up, my disc as got scratched so game over there

[highlander]

If you have a license for the software, just download a Windows 7 disc image (.ISO) off the internet, and install it using the key that came with your real installer disc. Or is it a laptop? In which case you need a new recovery disc - you might be able to find a .ISO image of your laptop's recovery disc on the internet.

[lozz]

If you have a license for the software, just download a Windows 7 disc image (.ISO) off the internet, and install it using the key that came with your real installer disc. Or is it a laptop? In which case you need a new recovery disc - you might be able to find a .ISO image of your laptop's recovery disc on the internet.

Cheers mate,

good idea on the O/s. ive been looking a image, but everything seems to have been closed down, Pirate bay etc

[highlander]

The Pirate Bay is still open, but BT have been ordered to block access to it. These file sharers will not ever go away, and there is no way for the copyright lawyers to completely eradicate software piracy or copyright theft, or even slow it down. All they end up doing is pissing off legal file share users.

I would suggest you just nip round to one of your mates' houses with your laptop, and ask if you can borrow their WiFi for a couple hours Just as long as they're not on BT...