BT Infinity 2 Review - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

[fojacko]

So, i've had BT Infinity (option 2) for almost a month now, so I figured i'd do a review.

 

The Good

- Faster Speeds. Obviously this was going to be on the list of good things. My internet speed previously was 5mb/s down, 0.8mb/s up, not the worst speeds out there but still crappy for downloading games, watching videos etc. My speeds now are roughly 74mb/s down, 16mb/s up, a HUGE improvement, although i'm fairly sure our ISP was throttling us as i'd get 5mb/s down on wireless and ethernet, which always seemed odd to me.

 

- Cheaper. This is where things got weird for me, our bill for internet used to come it at (roughly) £55/month, that included internet, line rental and "free" anytime calls. But the cost for infinity 2 was advertised as being £10 more expensive, but is actually £40/month with the same things included, i'm not complaining but the fact it's cheaper for us is really weird. However, this is most likely just a single case to us.

 

That's all for the good, I mean it's faster internet, can't really talk about anything else.

 

The Bad

- Crappy ISP router. As with all ISP's, they give you a crappy router, the Homehub5 though, oh boy this thing is a pile of crap. Let's start of with the fairly constant crashing it had, roughly 2 or 3 times a day it'd crash and not recover, so i'd have to unplug it from the wall to hard reset it, because the built in reset button would simply not work, luckily it seems to have sorted itself out. Next. The router software has "port forwarding", this'd be great if it actually worked, it has a built in list of software that looks like it was compiled in the 90's with options for port forwarding such classics as "MSN Gaming Zone". I tried a simple port forward of Minecraft, but it didn't work. I hoped BT would've upgraded the firmware since the Homehub2, but clearly not.

 

Luckily that's the only bad thing to say about the BT Infinity and frankly it has little to do with the service.

 

The Ugly

- Installation. Ok so the installation is basically russian roulette, I had to wait a week for the installation, fair enough, but after some research i noticed that alot (and i mean practically everyone) of people complained about contractors not moving their master socket (which is what gets upgraded), however openreach are fine with moving it. I shrugged it off and figured that it'd be fine. Nope, we got a contractor and when he came, I asked him if he could move the master socket, he said, and i quote "That's physically impossible". Inside I laughed and cried a little. I figured i'd just say OK, i couldn't be bothered with arguing with him. So for 2 days I went with wireless connection until a friend of my dad (who is a certified BT engineer) came round to move the master socket that was "physically impossible" to move.

 

This seems like it should be on the bad list, but I know it wont effect everyone as some people already have their master sockets installed in the location they want it.

 

 

 

One last thing to note is that the speeds are a bit over the place for the first few days, so keep that in mind when the speeds you initially get are not as advised. They should buff out.

[rjshield]

Its probably a bit much to ask one of their installation engineers to move the master socket without asking them prior. The guy will have a schedule to stick to which would make it "physically impossible" to be on time to the next customer, BT charge to move master sockets anyway. I've seen up to £127 quoted before. (I know you moved yours through freinds).

[Ivyk]

This is more like a tech newbie review than an actual review with specs and whatnot.

[fojacko]

This is more like a tech newbie review than an actual review with specs and whatnot.

True. I wanted it to be simple, more of me describing my experience so far then people can see my experience and then make up their own choice on if they're going to buy it or not. One thing that personally bothers me is when a review tells me that I need to buy something or if i should avoid it, for example I love the movie "the pacifier", that has 5.5/10 on imdb and 20% on rotten tomatoes and i don't like skyrim, that has 94/100 on metacritic.

[.:MARK:.]

Bleh, lets discuss the service that is being provided not the damn review itself! Besides I have heard that BT doesn't throttle its connections. Also is the anytime calls really anytime or is it evening and weekend? Are you annoyed by stupid TV packages that they give you that may inflate the prices but you cant remove?

[Damikiller37]

Bleh, lets discuss the service that is being provided not the damn review itself! Besides I have heard that BT doesn't throttle its connections. Also is the anytime calls really anytime or is it evening and weekend? Are you annoyed by stupid TV packages that they give you that may inflate the prices but you cant remove?

BT has what the call "Totally Unlimited Usage" which in fact is exactly what it says. They don't throttle you no matter what you do; whether you game, stream, use P2P services and no matter what time of the day it is you will not get throttled at all. I've had BT Infinity 2 for about a year now and whenever I download games from Steam/Origin and I cap out on 9Mb/s it will never get reduced unless it's the clients fault.

 

*The review*

I personally had no problems with the installation. They did take a week to get to us after we ordered it but once the engineer arrived it took him about 20 min to do his magic with the socket and to set up both boxes.

 

As for the port forwarding... yeah BT routers suck at it and I couldn't port forward my Minecraft server (I have the BT HomeHub 3)

 

Also I have never had my router crash and not recover. The only time it goes off is at late night (2am-3am) but recovers after 10min. According to BT they do it either for maintenance or to restart the network or something like that.

 

Lastly with the speeds, you have to make sure that both of the boxes are always on since if you turn them of the will take hours to recover and stabilize hence why your speeds may be all over the place. One thing to not is that I have had teh same problem at first since we were the first people in our area to connect to our local fiber box and since it was all newly installed they had to tinker with it to make it stable. After a few months it became extremely stable and I constantly get above 70Mb/s down and 18Mb/s up with it very rarely going below those numbers. 

[consoleconvergence2pc]

let me just put in my input as i've had bt infinity for about 3 years now.

 

1st i really don't no how your speed is that slow (maybe its the area you live) , i get around 150mb down and 100mb up

2nd bt does not throttle your connection and with every other isp from day 1 of installation your connection will not be fully up to scratch normally takes about a week where you're connection does get better after that its normal and speeds will never run at what it was advertised to be of what you payed for you're package which seems very expensive for me £40 which you think was a deal. I currently pay about £22 a month for unlimited broadband plus the line rental which you get free calls after 6pm and an additional bt sport free of charge.

btw im running homehub 3 and 5 is meant to be alot faster 

[SeriuzBuzinez]

I know a few people with BT Infinity and one of them gets near enough exactly what they pay for, my other friend who lives in a student area close to his uni gets awful speeds which I assume is because they have too many subscribers in the area, they did say they was upgrading the network though so maybe he has faster speeds now, I had to choose a while ago and went with Virgin Media as they offered more for the same price and I always get over 100Mb and will be getting 150Mb sometime in may.

 

Only downside with Virgin Media is the traffic management but that has only affected me once when I was downloading 10 movies at once, aside from that I use a VPN to hide my torrenting and they only manage you in the evening so people making a big deal over it are either downloading a hell of a lot of stuff, torrenting without a VPN or just crying about it without seeing for themselves that the majority of the time your hardly ever going to get throttled by them anyway, even when I was throttled 50Mb is still really fast and after an hour they restore the speed back if you cut back a bit.

[T0M3Z]

Ordered BT Infinity 2 about a week ago, the earliest date for me is the 29th April, so seems its alot longer than most people on here.

Can people tell me what thier quoted speeds were and what they actually get?

I get about 8 down and 0.8 up on adsl 2 so cant wait for the extra speed!!

[EricX2]

So to anybody not there and doesn't know what is BT Infinity 2? Cable/DSL/Fibre/something else?

[fojacko]

Ordered BT Infinity 2 about a week ago, the earliest date for me is the 29th April, so seems its alot longer than most people on here.

Can people tell me what thier quoted speeds were and what they actually get?

I get about 8 down and 0.8 up on adsl 2 so cant wait for the extra speed!!

 Quoted 76 down, 19 up. Actual 74 down 16 up.

 

So to anybody not there and doesn't know what is BT Infinity 2? Cable/DSL/Fibre/something else?

Fibre.

[sof006]

I don't understand why you're having so many problems with the Homehub5. My mate who lives in the same street as me as exactly the same model (He used to have the one previous and upgraded for free) and his has worked since day one, never had any issues and his coverage goes all around the house with super fast speeds.

 

 

Btw on BT you're not limited to using the BT equipment, you can go out and purchase your own router and use that if you so wish. But in all honestly I think you have a faulty router and can probably get it replaced or it is using a beta firmware that is buggy.

 

 

I'm on Sky fibre and I get exactly the same speed as my mate on BT (give or take a few Mb's)

 

 

Usually you'll get the advertised speed it says on BT/Sky/whatever's website. 

[Frix]

The only problem I have had with my HomeHub5 is that the connection doesn't quite reach around the whole house...sometimes.

[Scottonpc]

You could of gone with Plusnet Unlimited Fibre Broadband and Calls for £35 a month, up to 76mb download speed. The router is not very good, so the Asus rt n66u is recommended.