Green Boxes on the street, are they all BT?

[TheGamE]

I heard that if you are getting broadband from BT, make sure the 'Green Box' is close.

I have a green box not more than 20 yards from my house. I just can't tell whether it is BT or not.
I checked the service from their website and for the 78mb connection I am estimated at 76mb. My guess is it is the BT box to get such good connection. But then again, it is from BT website, they may be over advertising.

Is there a way to tell if it is a BT box?

Thanks.

[Miner28]

not necessarily true, i used to have BT however we changed to talktalk and have the same speeds,

[Southpaw]

They are called "cross connection cabinets" and unless you live in Kingston upon Hull where Kingston Communications provides the telephone system then they will either belong to BT or Virgin ( Virgin was formerly Telewest ).
Telewest only cabled easy targets like new towns for cost reasons and now Virgin and other licenced providers in other areas lease lines off BT for ADSL and now I believe for "fibre to the cab" as well.
BT can estimate pretty much exactly the speed you will get using fibre to the cab, 76 is the sum of the upload and download speed by the way, and you will only achieve that speed by connecting your computer to the new router / modem by Ethernet cable, WiFi will be half that speed usually, but it does not matter that much as it is faster than most servers at present, and pretty handy if you are connecting lots of devices at the same time.
So it will likely be a BT cabinet and here are a few pictures to help you make your mind up;
http://uk.images.search.yahoo.com/search...nets+types
For 76 Mb to be available it should be a very new and large cabinet with a big sticker on the front bearing the legend "fibre broadband is here", or something similar as the best you can get with ADSL copper wires to the cab is about 20Mb
You might want to have a look at Plusnet who are actually owned by BT, but have an English call centre;
http://www.plus.net/
The effects on your speed by the distance to your cabinet have been largely overstated, it might have once been the case, but technology has advanced and now it does not matter so much.
I have BT Infinity and the new fibre optic cab is actually further away from my house than the old copper cabled cab was and get exactly the combined speed that was forecast by BT, 49 Mb, used to get 19 Mb.
Regards, ex BT Bob.