BT Rolls Out Free 20Mbit Broadband Upgrade Comments

Well before this BT said I could get 5 Mbs, now with this 'upgrade to 20 Mbs' I can get 7 Mbs. I am currently getting 16Mbs from O2.

Sounds like BT are being honest and telling you what speed they expect to be able to get from your line. What actual speed are you getting from O2 - I presume you are on their "up to" 16mb offering.

I called BT to cancel so I could switch from their Option 3 (up to 8Mbps) package to BeThere's up to 24Mbps service, which actually costs less. The person at BT simply couldn't understand why I wanted to change. Duh...

My g/friend also has BT Option 3 and lives just 2 Km from the exchange. She only gets between 600Kbps and 1Mbps!

Have been with BT for a number of years and still there mainly because the local exchange has not been unbundled.
Originally i was getting close to 3mb now am lucky to get 1.5mb.
Strangely when i enter my full postcode into the BT broadband speed estimator i should get 6mb, enter my telephone number and it drops to 1.5mb.

It seems the quality of the line on your actual street is extremely important. I'm with BT up to 8 meg, and I was lucky to get 1.5, less than a mile from the exchange. Then BT 'upgraded' the phone line on my street, and overnight the connection went to 4 meg.

I'd be interested to see if other ISPs would have shown the same poor performance.

I have been with BT for 14 months, 12 months on option 3, they originally told me the fastest speed I would get was 256kbp/s but after complaining of only getting less than half of that even in the early hours of the morning (3am) my speed jumped from 160kbp/s to 424kbp/s (connection speed showing on the homehub) then on new years day after 4 months of been connected that speed without a problem my connection drops and reconnects at 160kbp/s with speed tests showing a download speed of 0.09kbp/s to 0.1kbp/s.
Why is it that small communities seem to be the ones to miss out on any upgrade to the speeds? On my investigations I have found that where I am no matter how much an increase in speed is advertised I will not be able to get an increase in my present speed on my BT line even by 2012

As this presumably means that BT has ADSL2+ equipment in these exchanges, is this also available to other ISP [if they want] that use these exchanges that haven't LLU your line? Some of these other ISP are even owned by BT e.g. PlusNet

I signed up for my free upgrade, and almost immediately got a warning about reaching my Fair Use Policy limit. Seems that once you sign up, BT are a little harder on the FUP than before.
My downloads were always scheduled for late night anyway, so as not to get in the way of gaming, and to just be a good netizen. The new way BT deal with FUP though is to wait till you hit their limit (100GB), and then ruin your connection. Not that they care how much you download (it being an unlimited service I'm on), just that they don't want you to use it. So I'm now on 1mb connection, during any hours that I'm awake and not at work. What can I do though? Pisses me off. I actually have a worse connection than before.

@Tony, I am actually getting 16Mbs from O2.

I guess this is why Sky have emailed me about the same free speed upgrade then.

if you can't fit an accelerator try taking out the <a href="http://broadband-speedup.blogspot.com/">Bell Wire</a> does the same thing.