Friday, September 07, 2012

Ditched the Virgin!

We've been with Virgin Internet since the dial-up days but now we're joining the Big Boys.
Fibre optic broadband, giving, for us, about 10x the speed of conventional  technology, has arrived in the village.  Being of the Cutting-Edge persuasion I wasted no time in extracting the MAC number from Virgin and passing the baton to our new benefactors, British Telecommunications.
Setup was painless on 3rd September and we've enjoyed the cheek-flapping velocity of this new technology.  We were used to a download speed of around 3.5 Mb/s at most and uploads around 0.35.
NOW, whilst not constant, we're getting in the high 30's and low 40's down and a steady 4.5 up.

BT Infinity Hub 3b

Rear of Hub

Inside ( I like insides)

The Hub is partnered with an Openreach modem which plugs into the new master socket faceplate and then in the hub thus:
Inside the Modem


Best results are in quiet hours and on my iMac which is cabled to the hub, wi-fi connected hardware won't achieve maximum speeds due to interference and loss of signal when some distance from the hub.
Here's the best so far:

The only downside, so far, is the loss of the Virgin email address, I've gone to Google Gmail (which should avoid any problems if our Internet Provider should change in the future).




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