[fatkid2000]

We're on the move this week - to near Psalter Lane. The house we're buying has fibre-opic cable connected and a standard BT land line.

From what I know from the vendors they had a BT phone line, fibre-optic internet & sky TV. Which seems an expensive way of doing things. Anyone got any views on the fibre-optic internet or is it just an overrated waste of money. Virgin claim I can get 50 meg / sec which I don't believe. Just wandered if anybody else ran it or had any experience of it.

Thanks in advance

[butters]

Using the Virgin Media fibre connection here at chez Butters - it does what it says in the tin basically - apart from the install taking forever (which was down to an address issue at the flats that I live in and is unlikely to affect you if you are moving to a house) it has been no problem at all.
 
With regard to 50 meg \sec - it is a theoretical maximum and unless you are living in the exchange itself you will not see that and the further you live away from the exchange the lower the maximum speed you get. Do you even need 50 meg\sec anyway - I am something like 8 meg here and it proves more than adequate for what I need - it connects me to the internet and lets me post rubbish on here, download stuff and the like all for £15 or £20 a month.

My advice would be to ditch the BT landline and go for the Virgin TV\phone\internet package that they do.

[Lund]

If it's fibre all the way, then you're laughing and you can go with the BT line - however, if it's just fibre betwixt house and the box in the street, then copper to the exchange, then the extra bit of fibre will give you little benefit.

For the sky option, then you get crap upload speeds but great downloads speeds IIRC - has to use the phone line for upload but the dish for download.  I never tried it in the end as the sky fitter man took one look at my roof and decided we couldn't have sky fitted as he was too scared to go on it.

Virgin's fast - fibre all the way, so no speed loss.  However, virgin's customer service is second to none for being shit.  Don't go with them unless you really like spending hours on the phone listening to alt-pop.

Personally, I've just got a bog-standard phone line, and an O2 broadband over ADSL on that.  It's been fine.  Don't know what speed I get.  But don't download gigs of pr0n either so