Well - today (Friday) has had an interesting start.

On my (infrequent) check wih BT's Broadband checker, my line now apparently has the 100mbps service available. It would seem that super-fast broadband has gone live in Forest Hill.

It offers a mix of BT Infinity 100 Package with guaranteed 100 mbps download and 15mbps upload speeds and BT Infinity Packages with 40 mbps download and 10mbps or 2 mbps upload speeds. It is noteworthy that BT are playing loose with their use of terminology by labelling these speeds as "Mb" - an entirely different metric from "mbps". Also noteworthy is BT's slippage of the declared package speed from 110 mbps to 100 mbps.

As Newforester stated Option 3 is the BT Infinity 100 Package priced at £35 pcm - but line charges are not included.

BT Infinity Option 2 (40 down/10 up) is priced at £28 (for approximately the next 2 weeks) rising to £29.40 pcm and line charges are not included.

BT Infinity Option 1 (40 down/2 up) is priced at £18 and once more line charges are not included. This option is the ony one with a 40Gb download limit.

During the process BT advised that a free pre-installation survey would be necessary on my premises and that a £6 fee would be required to cover the delivery of the new BT Homehub.

Analysis of these newly revised prices reveal two facts - the much vaunted £28 pcm rate applies only to the 40 mbps option and does not include line rental - which rises to £13.40 pcm in December and that on a like-for-like comparison with my last bill, Option 3 represents a 42.15% increase.

Both facts will be seen to be major disappointments - but I am sure some will write this significant premium off to being the price of progress.

There is no mention of BTs publicly promised increase from 100 to 300 mbps scheduled for January 2012 and whether this will have a price impact.

For SEN the speeds on my (as yet non-Infinity) line have been fluctuating between 5.5 and 13 mbps this month as well - but BT have assured me it has nothing to do with the fibre optic build.

Well, the BT engineer is installing my 40mb Infinity as I type. I wonder if I could have had 100mb...

I am currently tethered to my iPhone to stay online and pages are loading much faster than they did on my old broadband line, which tells you how bad that was.

Just out of interest, where do you both live (roughly)?

I'm still unimpressed that BT have only covered HALF of Forest Hill, and left the other half without fibre

I am Infinite. Hear me download...

Any-hoo, I'm on Mayow Road, near Forest Hill School.

Engineer has finished and I now just have to go change the wi-fi settings for about fifteen different devices. Hoping the Infinity is going to be a bit more stable that the old broadband.

For rshdunlop, you can simply re-check whether BT Infinity 100 is available on you line on the BT Broadband Checker on BT.com. If you were part of the early fibre optic build for Forest Hill exchange, you may have FTTC in which case your speed of 40 mbps will be the max for the meantime. Rumour (unconfirmed) is BT will double that speed to 80 mbps in the near future.

If you are part of the FTTP build and the 100 mbps option is available you could of course consider a further upgrade now.

I would love to see your line stats published here - and I wish you the best with your Infinity.

For Samurai, I live hard on the SE23/SE6 boundary on Perry Hill some 1.85 km approx by cable route from the exchange.

I have witnessed BT completing installation works in the roads in the estate which adjoin the Lower Sydenham to Catford Bridge railway line which is contained in the Bellingham Ward and is linked to Forest Hill.

Accepted wisdom has it that roll-outs are phased as each sector is completed.

However I have seen no authoratative statement from BT about status of completion or meaningful or specific go-live dates.

We know from earlier posts that the FTTC option is available and has gone live in Kirkdale.

Testing my speed and it's up and down from minute to minute at the moment. Anything between 5mb and 25mb. Is this normal with a new install? Stupidly I didn't ask the engineer to show me a speed test before he left.

That level of fluctuation is normal in the wider sense with broadband.

I have not had a great deal of hands-on with Infinity yet but generally with broadband your speed is being monitored and adjusted between the exchange and your router by a piece of software at the exchange end.

It attempts to optimise the speed at which your particular line will operate in a stable fashion during a "training period". It reads all sorts of things including signal strength and background noise which indivudually will have a direct bearing on your line speed and will make adjustments automatically.

Initially this can mean significant fluctuation but those fluctuations should settle down as it fine tunes the settings. This so-called training period can last between 24-72 hours by which time you should have a real sense whether your installation has been successful.

As a cast iron rule you should not power down the router during that training period. You may see it dis-connecting and re-setting itself during that period but that is perfectly normal.

In most cases this settles down quickly with line stats that are entirely acceptable.

BT engineers tend to dismiss enquiries about speed for the first 5-10 days on the basis that they may intervene if the automatic software does not bring about the required result and issues warnings to them.

Examples of problems that could prevent good line stats are poor connections or damaged cables and of course, if you are FTTC, the last few metres from your nearest cabinet are still the original copper cables.

I trust your wi-fi re-tuning exercise wasn't too onerous - and if you have a new Homehub 3 - I have been very impressed by its three dimensional transmission rates.

Thanks jgdoherty - I thought my husband was going to have my head on a spike when he got home from work and found our download speeds were on occasion worse than before. Now I can tell him to hold the divorce papers for a while.

The wi-fi is holding up beautifully. We use a lot of wi-fi devices, sometimes as many as ten at a time, and have always suffered drop-outs between them and the router. At the moment, wifi connection is speedy and stable.

As of Sunday afternoon, my stats are as follows:

Ping 15ms
Download 32.63mb
Upload 7.26mb

This is over wifi, so most impressive. Everything holding steady since yesterday morning.

The only problem we have encountered so far is with the router getting confused by our plug-in extender. If a device connects via the extender, the router assigns that device as being connected by ethernet rather than wireless (probably because the extender master unit is connected via ethernet). It doesn't like that at all - possibly because it looks like there are more devices connected via ethernet than it has ethernet ports - and won't let those devices connect to the router. Even if those devices are disconnected from the extender, the router won't connect with them directly unless the router is restarted to clear all the ethernet connections it *thinks* it has. Hopefully I'll be able to find a work-around for that. The old HomeHub 2 had no problems with the extender.

Thanks for the stats. I'm trying to contact someone at BT with regards to the rest of Forest Hill, but I'm getting the bog standard responses. That's ok though... I've got nothing but time on my side to email every address I find

rshdunlop - not to be too intrusive, but as I said before I have been very impressed by the HH3's range and its three dimensional capability. When it has been installed as a replacement for an HH2 in a three storey house, it has reached all the blindspots the HH2 could not reach (does this sound like one of those old beer adverts?) and on all three floors.

It may be worth experimenting and try to connect at least some of your devices directly to the HH3 using wi-fi.

Incrementally, if they all connect, you may not need the extender at all. Alternatively you may find that the number of devices that need to connect via the extender is reduced.

On a note that is a little too technical for here, you could ensure that the extender is configured in such a way that all DHCP functions are being managed by the HH3. This would mean that clear downs on disconnection are being managed by the HH3 and is not getting confused between the HH3 and the extender.

Trust this helps.

I still need the extender as one of the blind spots is behind a goal-post steel frame embedded in the walls where we did a knock-through. I've tried connecting from beyond that point directly to the HH3 but it's no go. I once lived in a sky-scraper apartment where the individual rooms were built as steel boxes for fire safety - couldn't get wifi to reach the next room.

Will review the dhcp settings tomorrow. I was banned by the rest of the family from fiddling with it over the weekend!

Well the check finally went gold a few weeks back and after mulling the merits of going to BT from O2/Be, I placed the order and will be installed on the 10th. I'm on Mayow Road across from the Schools (between the two), so am hoping to at least get the results jhdoherty is getting! Fingers crossed!

Congratulations to Moreno - trust everything goes smoothly.

BT currently quote an approximate 2+ week lead time for installation of FTTP.

My neighbour has their "dig" phase scheduled for next week when the fibre cable will be installed right into their home from the nearest pit and the commission date is set for the week after.

Has anyone else any experience yet of the full FTTP installation at either the 40mbps or 100mbps as opposed to FTTC?

I'm pretty certain that what I'm getting is FTTC. I ordered online on the 31st and was given an install date of the 10th... so including the holidays that's 6 business days. Now let's see what they deliver. I'm a bit trepidatious about the switch to BT after being with O2/Be for years, but there was no other comparable fibre service for anywhere near the same money, and tripling the monthly cost of our broadband wasn't going to fly with my financial manager!

Well here we are rapidly racing toward the end of January 2012 - doesn't the year fly past quickly I hear you say.

Interestingly, BT Infinity roll out for the Forest Hill exchange remains stubbornly and inexplicably patchy.

As we have gathered from several sources the roll out would be phased and the phasing would be determined by completion of the fibre optic cable lay. Best information seemed to tell us that this these phases would be complete by end of 2011 and that all of the area covered by Forest Hill would have Infinity - in either of the FTTC or FTTP forms.

Not so - many cabinets and their associated areas of coverage still have no provision and interestingly no forecasts. Once more it would seem that BT are institutionally inept at managing even a simple programme.

For those of us lucky enough to have be in an area with an activated cabinet and the BT offering of FTTC - installations appear to be fairly quick and relatively painless.

However if you are in an activated area and being offered FTTP, connections to the service are being deferred and delayed by BT by upto four weeks and this without guarantee or certainty and with the probability of further delays.

The problem appears to be two-fold.

Firstly BT seemingly cannot adequately organise the "required property survey" and it would seem that even after the first detailed survey, further visits to site are deemed necessary resulting in slippage of any planned installation date.

Secondly if excavation is required to lay new ducts and cable, this adds a seemingly unquantifiable delay where any planned date offered by BT comes with a health warning about the absence of certainty.

If I were to speculate, it seems possible that BT are packaging the excavation work into small batches of adjacent properties that have ordered the FTTP option - a practice that indicates that the excavation teams are being imported from outside London and therefore do not travel in to do single installations.

Having suffered two deferrals for an FTTP order, one without explanation and having received a revised February (2012) date for completion (with the obligatory "of course this may not be achievable..." warning) , it has become tedious making new arrangements for the required Engineer Installation visit.

Has anyone spotted any new source for revised dates for the phased roll out ?

Almost as an aside, for those business properties where the fibre optic cable lay past their premises is complete and the area has become active, BT Business still decline to take orders for the Infinity product.

As late as last Friday I was advised by an informative BT lady that even though connection was possible, BT Business had not yet published plans for Forest Hill and would be contacting customers directly only after that event.

Has any BT Business customer had any calls from BT on this point ?

This post was last modified: 24-01-2012 10:05 AM by jgdoherty.

Braodband issues are strange. I use Sky who average about 12meg and at peak times down to about 8meg. I test it quite often and was suprised to get 25meg last week.

I use speedtest.net so is fairly reliable.

Hi Londondrz

Virginmedia announce in recent weeks that they were beginning the roll out of major upgrades to their network.

I have no firm information on their activity in Forest Hill but perhaps their engineers have been running intermittent trials based upon their recent promise to double speeds for ALL UK customers by February 2012.

For more permanent upgrades, no doubt they will publish data on their web-site.

During BT's long running saga of upgrade, I have also seen short periods of meteoric increases in BT's speed, sadly only too short lived before it crashed back to normal. Mind you it is worth saying that on the old copper broadband side they have incrementally moved the speed to a consistent 12.5 ish mbps in recent months without the obligatory slump in performance.

I have speculated about whether this reflects greater numbers of users in FH moving to the Infinity network and thereby reducing contention issues and improving performance for those of us yet to convert.

I find that Speedtest is usually very reliable too.

Virgin are predicting April for upgrades to the Lewisham infrastructure in their rollout update, so it looks like they will miss their February target.

My fibre to the home 100mbps infinity is installed in 10 days, I will post feedback once it's in. Vroom!

This post was last modified: 24-01-2012 08:51 PM by Bcm.