Everything seems fine!

[#1]

Installation arranged for 8am-1pm on Monday morning, router arrived the preceding Thursday.
Engineer turned up at 9:10am (didn't call in advance), took about 30 mins for the installation.
He said the BT modem was all checked out and working fine, we made sure the home phone was still working and he disappeared off before I got Plusnet running - a bit worrying!
I'm quite surprised at how bit the BT modem is, was expecting a tiny box like my original Speedtouch ADSL modem.
Plugged the TG582n in, made a cup of tea as stated in the instructions and 15mins later had FTTC internet.
I get 35Mb down / 8 Mb up. Not as good as others on here but as I previously had 1.5Mb/0.3Mb (I'm about 2 miles from the exchange and about 0.5 miles from the cabinet), it's like lightning.
I was worried about the Wifi performance of the TG582n after reading a lot of negative comments on this forum, but that's not my experience at all.
The Wifi signal is quite a bit stronger than my trusty old DG834G and easily covers the whole house and a fair chunk of the garden.
Configuring the TG582n is absolutely NOT intuitive. Had a lot of trouble forwarding ports for incoming FTP access, people not familiar with telnet access into the router will have trouble. You also need to telnet into the router to configure an alternative DNS [e.g. OpenDNS].
But generally well pleased.
One thing - I've been wanting FTTC for a while and have been keeping an eye out for the new cabinet appearing and have been monitoring the BT Wholesale availability webpage so I ordered it as soon as it was available. But why doesn't Plusnet email it's customers when FTTC becomes available on their lines, rather than expecting them to keep monitoring the situation?

[#2]

Quote

Configuring the TG582n is absolutely NOT intuitive. Had a lot of trouble forwarding ports for incoming FTP access, people not familiar with telnet access into the router will have trouble. You also need to telnet into the router to configure an alternative DNS [e.g. OpenDNS].

For a silver surfer like myself that statement is absolute gibberish. My fibre works OK & I haven't done any of those things. Am I missing something?? My Asus router has menus for all these functions but I don't use them & my network works OK.

[#3]

You can take comfort that along with a significant proportion, if not the majority, of users your objectives are probably browsing websites, perhaps including social media pages, streaming videos/TV/radio, emails and maybe VoIP (Internet based phone calls). All of these things - including access from smart-phones, etc - can be done without needing any of the facilities mentioned earlier.

[#4]

Hi alanonplusnet,
Glad to see that your happy with the fibre service.
We do have campaigns of notifying customers when fibre has recently become available albeit not all the time. It's something that has been mentioned before, I guess it's to do with the data we need from our suppliers to do this.
Chris

[#5]

Before I had Fibre available I registered on the BT Broadband website to be informed as soon as Infinity (Fibre) was available to me, I still haven't received any notification but I've been on Plusnet Fibre since September 2011:  It's best to keep checking yourself rather than relying on others to tell you.