Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) trial - Ends Soon

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The FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) trial is now closed for residential customers. Residential customers requiring an FTTC connection should visit www.plus.net/fibre for our new fibre products.  FTTC Business trials are still ongoing. For those of you who are not aware we've been running a trial of FTTC for the last few months and we're looking to take on more participants. If you’re wondering what FTTC is, it stands for fibre to the cabinet and is what BT Retail use for their Infinity product. An FAQ about FTTC is available here: http://community.plus.net/fttc_faq/ So, I guess you’re thinking wow this is for me! Especially if I tell you that the average download speed of our existing trialists is around 30mbps!  However, before signing up we must stress that this is still a trial and things can go wrong. We also need to tell you that this technology is not available to everyone and urge you to check for availability first via this link: http://www.dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/adslchecker.welcome Unfortunately if the checker shows a date in the future or the service is unavailable then you won't be able to take part in this trial. Around 15-20% of the country will be able to get FTTC within the next few months. There's a few more things we think you should know before considering this, first of all your current ADSL hardware is unlikely to be compatible for this, however we are happy to provide suitable hardware to you at no extra cost. We will also cover any installation costs which may be applicable. We are noticing that the vast majority of speed faults raised by our trialists are due to their wireless equipment not being able to handle the FTTC speeds. Basically the majority of people will be using wireless B and/or G standard hardware, this is fine for up to 8Mb ADSL but is not capable of speeds of up to 40Mb so we only recommend using this service if you have wireless N standard equipment or plan to upgrade soon. Lastly on the subject of faster speeds, it's worth thinking about usage as you will most likely use a lot more bandwidth. As you'd probably expect we've seen a massive increase in usage from our triallists. The increase is highest for those customers who have seen the biggest improvements moving from ADSL to FTTC. With that in mind any Value customers who are considering giving this a go should consider upgrading to one of our other account types with higher usage allowances like Extra or Pro. Please remember that this a trial and we will periodically test and change settings to help us work out how to implement our traffic management policies. We currently have just over 400 customers on the trial and have space for more to join, the last day to register interest is 25th January so please visit http://trials.plus.net quick smart if you're interested. Please allow up to 2 weeks for a reply to your request and in some areas of the country there's a 4-6 week lead time for appointments. As a thank you to all of our existing trial customers and anyone that can get FTTC and registers their interest by 25th January (even if we haven't replied to your ticket or booked the engineer appointment) they can stay on their existing product at the same price for FTTC as they would for ADSL for as long as they like. We would though say that should you want to change product, for example to our Extra or Pro products, that put the request in as soon as possible as from April you would only be able to change to an FTTC product. We will send all our trial customers an email shortly to confirm this. For those customers on our FTTP trial, we now intend to continue this trial until July and will continue to accept triallists during that time. We'll post a further update later in the year. Anyone in the trial area in Bradwell Abbey or Highams Park (which you can check using the availability link above) wanting to take part should also visit http://trials.plus.net and raise a ticket