BT Infinity

[Inky Pete]

Anyone got any experience of BT Infinity?

Apparently they've just upgraded in our area and we can now get "up to" 40Meg speeds with this. (Can't get Virgin round us).

I'm currently paying about £30 a month including line rental for "up to" 8 Meg unlimited with Post Office, and usually get between 4 and 6 Meg. The current package has us paying for calls so we don't tend to use the landline much as we both have loads of free minutes on our mobile contracts. As I say, it tends to add up to just short of £30 a month at the moment.

Now BT are saying they'll do BT Infinity with a 40 Gig cap and free weekend calls for £28 a month once you add in the line rental, or £38 a month with no cap and free anytime calls.

Question is, how big is 40 Gig as caps go? 2 of us surfing pretty much every day, but it tends to be e-mail, Facebook, BBC News, Forums etc. rather than movies and downloading music.

They're also saying you get access to 2 million BT wireless hot-spots. How does that work? Does every BT customers Home Hub also become a hot spot? If so, how does that work security wise? Isn't a householder responsible legally for content downloaded via their connection?

Hardware wise, what are Home Hubs like? Are they reliable? (I've always used Netgear modem/routers and have never had one let me down) Do they have ethernet and USB ports? and can you plug your printer in to enable it to be shared across the home network?

Finally (thank God! I hear you say), BT say they'll send someone round to set up the connection and the Home Hub. Does that tend to include setting up all the devices on the wi-fi as well? I've currently got a PS3, a Wii, 2 smartphones, a laptop and a netbook all connecting wirelessly, plus a desktop PC and a NAS on ethernet cabling.

Anyone's personal experience of any of the above would be much appreciated.

[kellys_eye]

40 gig is plenty for anyone not doing heavy downloads (torrents, movies etc) but since a high speed connection is only useful if you DO download these things there's little point in having a 'fast' connection if you aren't going to use it! With downloads like those 'advertised' you really should be doing movies and the like and 40 gig could be used up quite easily - I can do well over a gig per day on a 'slow' connection ..... the additional fees for exceeding the 40 gig limit can be unexpectedly high - personally I'd pay the extra and then use the bandwidth accordingly.

The hubs they supply have a function to allow local hotspot generation/usage but the likelihood of anyone actually tapping in is pretty remote - if you live near a club, coffee shop, bar etc then someone will probably use it but....meh. It's a useful facility and an idea that I'm personally happy with supporting. The fact that 'you' could be held responsible for the content downloaded through it is something I'm not sure BT have addressed properly given the recent anti-piracy laws that are being proposed (passed?). For now I'd disregard that as an issue since if it DOES become your responsibility I'd suspect BT would allow you to disable the hotspot function - they can't reasonably refuse such a request.

The hubs are AFAIK fairly new so long-term reports on reliability are not easy to come by though I haven't heard of problems myself.

If you need BT's assistance in setting the device up then go for it! They will probably do ONE PC for you but setting up any item for wi-fi is really only a password-setting process - sugar-up the tech that arrives and there's no harm in asking.

[big-all]

for what you are paying i get broadband 20mb i think [but fast] free calls 24hrs to local national and o845 numbers and 100 mins to mobiles this is all inclusive including line rental for £30 and a few pence with talk talk

[Inky Pete]

Cheers guys, food for thought.

But one thing I do know is that I WON'T be going back to Talk Talk. Never, ever again.

[big-all]

ok if you have had a bad time
i have have minimal trouble

[Inky Pete]

I think they're probably fine as long as nothing goes wrong.

But I found their customer service and internal communications absolutely useless when faced with fixing a screw-up which they'd made in the first place.