The future. But in the 80s. with fire.

For those left reading (or caring) about mine and Bury’s Infinity and ISP exploits it’s here and I feel like I’m in the future!

The engineer arrived right on time and cracked on straight away, locating my phone line in the cabinet within 15 mins and coming back armed with a few tools an exciting VDSL box.

The face plate on my master socket was changed, which added a new data connection port (like a small CAT5 socket, I’ll get a picture and find out what connection it is)

I was then asked do I want the install (meaning  the VDSL modem and the Home Hub I’d already received) by my master socket or somewhere else as running a data extension kit to another location was part of the install with no extra cost.. result! I didn’t know that beforehand and was thinking about asking can I have an extension fitted and coughing up the extra money.

Once the cable was run to where I wanted it, it really was a case of the guy plugging the stuff in and switching it on. Rather unspectacular, no fanfare just a “Right.. you’re done. I’m measuring the full 40 at your master socket so it should be pretty quick”….. I couldn’t help but smile just like when my son remembers that trees are big and green and blow around in the wind “WOOHOO DAD IT’S ONLY A FREAKIN’ TREE! CHECK THAT OUT IT’S AMAZING WOOO!!!!!”

The engineer left me with my grin to set up the wireless on the Home hub as I was more than happy (read: I wanted to play) to do that as I had to go round all the devices in my home anyway.

Once that was set up and my wireless keys where changed I went to the first thing I could think of that I wanted to download and clicked it.

The file in question was a 140mb screen cast from Tekpub (about Rails 3 if anyone cares.. maybe a post on that later).
Previously this would have taken about 30 minutes and that’s a long time in the occasional 30 minute window of free time I get when both boys are asleep

Click ……………….. Done. (if you read those dots out loud as “dot dot dot dot” I reckon that’s about how long it took!)

3.5Mbyte/sec. What  a difference to 0.9ksec!

My wife wasn’t anywhere near as interested / excited as I was about the whole thing … as long as she could get iPlayer on the TV now and the occasional Peppa Pig episode to distract the oldest she was happy.

So that’s it really… I’m yet to experience anything less than 2Mbyte/sec for downloads and that’s during peak times. I’ll be impressed if the speed stays high during peak times as more and more people come on line with the service but overall I’m pleased with the experience of ordering, install and speeds.

Will blog back with interesting things (Traffic shaping being an interesting BT thing which you should be aware of when choosing ISPs)… any q’s just ask!