Here in Tunbridge Wells, we are expecting Infinity at any time soon. I work for BT and messing about with Broadband (although only on a customers premises) is my thing. We'll be getting Infinity for a token payment so I hope it's good!
People always get confused with their BB speed. Your connection speed is related to the length of your BT line and the quality of that line. As a rule of thumb, BB works up to about six or seven miles, over that you'll be lucky! This is where Infinity comes in as, with fibre to the cabinet it should, more or less, halve your copper pair of wires which should bring great improvements to those out in the wilds. Saying this of course, how long, if ever, BT will get around to this kind of technology on the more remote exchanges remains to be seen.
Connection speed is not your Speedtest speed. Your speedtest, or equivalent throughput will never equal your connection speed as it's the nature of the beast! Your connection speed is the important part of the equation as if your connection speed is poor, your throughput will always be bad. If you are on an 8Mb circuit and have an 8Mb connection speed, you'll be getting roughly 7Mb as the throughput at best. If you do a speedtest after about 4pm when all the kids come out of school, you won't get 7Mb! And if you do another in the evening it'll be even less.
Most ISP's aren't overly interested in your speedtest speed (they should, but they're not!) only in your connection speed. One of the biggest gripes I get from customers is this slowing down of the BB during the evening. You can explain this by imagining 100 customers using a 100Mb link to the Internet. During the day when only 20 odd are using the BB you'll get 5Mb each but in the evening when everyones at home you'll get 1Mb. This is the contention ratio and business BB is supposed to be better than ordinary home BB. Different ISP's have different contention ratios, BT's isn't very good!
Anyway, all good fun!!
Humpy