BT’s main broadband pages now offer quite a good guide to what flavours of Infinity are available, and at what price. This page might be of particular interest, as it explains the standard ordering and installation process.
Of course, the pricing and some of the hardware detail will only apply if you choose BT as your Internet Service Provider. But the actual process will be similar, as it looks as if a BT engineer will have to do the installation no matter who your provider may be. As previously advised, you should check with your existing ISP now to see if and when they intend to offer a competitive ‘super fast’ (i.e. 40Mb) service, and what their prices and procedures will be. Many providers have no immediate plans to offer such a service.
A useful list of providers known to be offering super fast services already is here – but it doesn’t claim to be exhaustive or fully up-to-date, so you should always check on the companies’ individual websites for current info (click on the company names in the left hand column to go to their sites).
Without wanting to recommend any particular supplier, PC Pro’s 2011 Excellence Awards rated Zen, Eclipse and PlusNet quite highly. If your existing ISP does support faster broadband, you will almost certainly be contacted by them once the service goes live.
The upgrade involves a BT engineer visiting the premises and installing a high speed broadband (VDSL) modem. If you have an existing broadband router, it is unlikely that this will work with the new modem. Most ISPs provide a new router or Home Hub as part of the contract. Remember that older networking equipment might not be able to take advantage of the speeds offered by faster broadband – there’s no point in having 40Mb download if your wireless network is slower than this or the router is incapable of handling several high speed clients.
Choosing an ISP is never easy, and faster broadband is no exception. Check the details, such as whether they cap bandwidth at certain times, how much they charge for activation, whether the headline price is for the first few months only, and what upload speed they offer. Although faster broadband is up to 40Mb download and 10Mb upload, most packages only provide 2Mb upload. This is not an issue if your main requirement is video streaming, but if you upload files or photos 2Mb is not the massive leap in speed you might hope for (in the above the abbreviation Mb is being used to express Mbit/s, megabits per second).
As of March 2012, PlusNet are apparently not offering a 10Mb upload package (for billing reasons?). There is also talk that Sky will be offering an uncapped service over BT FTTC as of April, but it’s not clear what upload speed they will provide. However if you are already a Sky TV subscriber, it might be worth waiting to see what they offer.