I have recently ordered BT Broadband / TV - Entertainment Youview+ Box and Phone and will be moving away from Virgin Media, just to bring the cost down of my entire package,

My query is this :-

1. The last time I had a BT line in the house was between 2008 and 2009, these were before the days where my street had FTTC.

2. When I put in my post code and telephone number (my number is still a Virgin number), I could only select the Youview + box and not the 4k Youview Box as a selected choice.

When I phoned BT and said when I placed my order I was not offered the choice for the 4k Youview box, which will give you BT Sport in HD/4K.
Although my TV is not a 4k TV set, my TV can handle HD.

BT told me my line was 2Mb too slow for the UltraHD/4k Youview box.

Now seeing as my house has not had a BT line in it since 2009, and FTTC did not exist, how can BT predict my line speed, having FTTC in my area. Which is postcode KT4.

I really would have like the Ultra/4K Youview box, even though I have not got the 4k Tv, I could still have utilised the HD part of BT Sport!!

I get the BT Broadband go in on 23rd Sep.

Any ideas!!!??

Cable length from the cab to your house will have a big impact on speed.

I did think about the copper length from the cab, which I am not sure where that is, so need to do some investigation on that one.

Did you get an estimate of the predicted speed at your address, even without a BT phone line, you can use the postcode....if your predicted speed is less than whatever the minimum speed needed for 4K that would explain why they won't let you have that 4K box, perhaps they checked what your line was capable of , even if you didn't

I think BT said my.estimated speed was going to be 51 or maybe 52. Which was 2mb slower than required to run the 4k BT Youview box
I'm gonna have a word with the engineer and see if he has any thoughts next Friday.
Not a lot I can do if it can't handle it, but we will see. The Line will be up to 52Mbps, rather than the up to 38mbps speeds out there. I will ask where the cab is, I don't think its far up my street, unless that VM's cab

The BT UHD box itself can easily run on 51 Mbps as the most it requires at any one time is 37 Mbps i.e. when recording one BT HD channel while viewing the 4K UHD channel. So it's a policy decision by BT not to provide these boxes at your speeds.

Their thinking is likely to be that they have a guaranteed minimum speed on installing FTTC connections of, I think, 15 Mbps. Below that, they provide ADSL instead. Add the 15 to the 37 required by the two channels I mentioned and you get 52Mbps, which is close to what they told you is needed, they are being rather unnecessarily strict about it though, I'd say.

If you would be happy to accept your general-use internet connection dropping below 15 Mbps when a BT HD and UHD channel are both connected or recording, maybe you could try to persuade them to supply the UHD box anyway, maybe with a connection speed disclaimer? You may of course get a faster than expected speed after installation but either way, the box will work OK, the only unknown is what your remaining Internet speed will be when you max out the UHD box. And you get the bigger hard drive too.

Well I will have a word with BT at some point about the upgraded box. All went very smoothly on 23rd Sep.
The engineer did a speed test at the cabinet, which came out at 55mbps. The router in the house gave speeds of 46mbps over WiFi, standing next to the router.