I was off contract with BT but having had a lightning strike a couple of months ago that caused a number of problems in our street due to the strike hitting the telephone cable poles, I've just arranged a new BT contract.
Mainly because they were threatening increased charges and the lightning strike had taken out the power supply for the hub and the landline functionality of our cordless phone answering machine base unit. I figured that if the power supply had blown there was some chance that the possibly slightly dodgy BT Hub5 installed some years ago might have been compromised. There was a deal, involving new landline charges, that retained the max local available Internet speeds, provided a new Smart Hub for a nominal delivery charge (but with BT retaining ownership of the hub) and offered a more useful Landline deal, all of which marginally reduce the price.
Basic BT sport is included but we never use it and Management has her full range of Freeview channels via a Humax recorder which we bought some years ago and seems to work well. BT TV not required.
Freeview now available over the internet as well but I doubt management would agree to running a cable from the hub to the TV.
I'll keep the old hub as a backup and return the power supply I used to replace the blown one to its original purpose as power for a disk drive.
The now limited landline calls (500 Anytime minutes a month) which we hardly use now includes calls to UK mobiles and of course no "setup" costs for less than the old out of contract price I have paid and which was retired from Sept 1st anyway.
We get the odd short glitch on the BB service, presumably because of engineering work somewhere locally, and at some peak times the speed can drop a bit for a short time. However, testing what is possible in quiet periods shows that the devices, connected via Wi-Fi, usually see around 65Mb download and a very consistent 18/19 Mb upload speed. In busy periods the upload is not much affected but the download can drop for short periods to about 25Mb.
Much depends in the server one is connecting to and the speed that it is set up to provide. Absolute speeds promoted by the service vendors are fine to talk about but the real world response is strongly influenced by the source (or target) servers and route the comms connection follows.
Virgin has cable running in the pavement around the Close and for years have pestered people to sign up for their service but judging by the Wi-Fi signals that can be seen locally most of the nearby houses seem to have BT. I suppose some may also have Virgin and/or Sky. Especially those who seek full sports coverage.
When I arranged the new contract deal I had a couple of questions for which I cold not find clear answers and following the suggested links on hte web site simply failed to allow be to place an order anyway. So I called them. A message suggested using the Chat function instead, so I did. Got straight through to a very helpful person probably somewhere in India or the sub-continent who was not enabled to view enough account details to deal with the order requirements but pointed me to a resource that could and everything was answered and explained quickly and effectively. Deal done just before the last BH. New hub shipped, as promised, on the first working day after the BH and arrived, as promised, the next day. The only thing that was not quite correct is the packaging of the hub. It's supposed to be of a size that will fit through a standard letterbox but no way would fit through ours.
I have yet to swap the hubs over. The existing hub still works and resetting the Wi-Fi extender which also server as the connection for a NAS device plus all of the mobile devices was something I didn't feel a need to rush into.
However, as it appear the Wi-Fi extender has developed a fault that means it is not connecting anyway the time may now be right to swap the hub, check whether the "most powerful hub ever" may make the extender obsolete and if not setup a new extender device I bought some time back to replace the existing one because it had developed a habit of locking up.
As usual with the technical things the threat of replacement and a visit to the dustbin seemed to cause the existing unit to improve its behaviour. On the principle of not changing something that is not obviously broken, I left things as they were. Seems like now is the time simply skip the diagnostics for the existing stuff and dive straight in to discover what the new kit has wrong with it!
My feeling is that with the standard BT BB speeds the connections are very adequate for my needs. Perhaps if we were downloading HD films several times a day I might come to a different conclusion but around here, in recent times since high speed broadband arrived a few years ago, things BT have generally worked pretty well. But we don't have BT TV. Maybe that makes a difference to perceptions.