For years people have been doing it with ADSL and managing so why all the hysteria?

Now its a one box deal there is no point to an engineer turning up at all, just take your old Home Hub off and shove the new HH5 in its place, the connections are the same.

There's the argument that VDSL2 is far more demanding than ADSL, and won't tolerate the miles and miles of often poor (cheap and nasty) extension cabling that would inevitably be used. It'll look quite bad on the ISP if the poor installation means dropouts and poor throughput.

That's why the BT install calls for a modem near the master socket, or if not, a dedicated extension over cat5 for a small maximum distance.

Are you willing to dig up a trench to your nearest exchange?

I'd quite like fibre... Stuck on 1 Mbps... Not commercially viable...

and you think the majority of people that get it, whack it on and lose 10Mbit because there wiring is shit are going to even notice?

Presumably if BT is that bothered regarding the installation they will include detailed instruction's and a faceplate.

when ADSL first came out it was an engineer install and required all the rigmarole associated with a FTTC install and that soon went down the pan when it was realised that generally people aren't that thick.

that said, the idiot that's designed this forum obviously couldn't manage a pissup in a brewery so maybe you have a point.

I find it quite amazing. I mean usually when something is new it's when there are major problems, with this new FTTC the only major problem has been the early overheating modems. Once that was fixed it really was smooth sailing. BT made the engineer do an excellent job spending hours sorting the wiring in your house giving you an excellent line and connection. Then they gave the jobs to contractors spending 5mins and leaving you a line worse than what you had before. Then they send a BT engineer to clean up the mess. Now this! not sure why they are changing direction greed?

It's not just Openreach decision, Sky and Talk Talk who resell FTTC would like their end users to think its their own service so when an Openreach engineer turns up it kinda knocks that on the head, same with a Openreach branded modem branded inside the property, and lastly it's cheaper for the ISP, that said if someone wants the full install experience with the data extension and sorting out of any potential internal wiring problems it's still available, the ISP should offer their end user the choice

I would certainly be willing to!

Saying that though you wouldn't believe the amount of people who think that the engineer that turns up works for Sky/TalkTalk anyway. I really don't think that most people know what Openreach is. Some have heard of it but don't know it's part of BT.

I got BT Infinity installed the other day and have to day I was very impressed with the BT engineer.

He replaced our old master socket, which must have been about 25 years old as it had the old British Telecom T logo on it, with a new Openreach one with built in telephone filter. He then went down to the cabinet to presumably connect us to the fibre, and then came back to lay an Ethernet cable to the BT TV box (just along the carpet for now but that was ok) and put in an Ethernet socket beside the box. Set up the BT TV box, registered it on the system and updated software etc.

He seems to have made a good job and it was a nice touch getting somebody to check things over.

Yes, when mine was installed last year two engineers turned up and did everything in tandem. I got Openreach to replace and rewire my outside box connecting me to the underground conduit wiring while BT Retail was messing with the Homehub, also got them to shift my old Home Highway boxes and generally tidy up the mess around my master socket, as well as pointing out where my DP and cabinets were and running line speed tests for me. May as well use 'em while they are here!

One thing that's crossed my mind regarding the self-install, perhaps it explains why many people have reported sudden major drops in their predicted line speeds on the BT Wholesale speed checker. Mine went down to a predicted 64.7Mbps but in reality, line speed has stayed up at 72Mbps. With dodgy home wiring remaining after self-installations, they probably feel that dropping the speed estimates was a necessary precursor to self-installs, to avoid a huge increase in the number of people complaining that their estimate isn't being met.

Am wondering though about how bloated Firefox is these days. On the bt wholesale speedtest site http://speedtest.btwholesale.com/ , I get 53Mbps d/l speed in Firefox but 69.9 in IE and Chrome. Not as big a difference on speedtest.net but even 9Mbps slower doesn't look good for Firefox.

It's definitely already happening anyway.

I have to chip in my 2p here and have a quick moan about how I think the branding of FTTC VDSL based services as "Mega Fibre, Super Fibre, Super Duper Fibre, Pro Fibre....." is a massive misleading joke and will likely come back to bite BT Openreach one day.

To me, this latest move of letting you install "Your fibre optic equipment" yourself is taking the Michael. Yes, let me install my shiny new fibre equipment and plug it into my copper pair phone line. DOH!

None of this, and I mean NONE of this should be marketed or sold as a Fibre installation unless it is full FTTP. There is no 'Fibre installation' or special engineer required. The customer has not 'Got' fibre, nor have they had fibre installed. The customer still has their same old copper pair, but a lesser distance to the PoP equipment.

Rant over....

P.S. I work in the IT/Telecommunications industry and it just angers me when companies try to pull wool over not so technically understanding folk with shiny words like "SUPERFAST FIBRE INSTALLATION"

You're not the most pleasant forum member are you? And why would being an Openreach Engineer who has to sometimes rewire shoddy extensions cause me to worry about my income? What a bizarre thing to say!