Be There Broadband - Whats It Like

[Jambooboo]

Woo-hoo!!111!!11!!!!!!!

Signed up yesterday and the order status is coming along nicely already. Told I should get around 16mbs down where I am (eight times my current speed), hence in theory I should be able to download a 4gb dvd movie a lot quicker than I can presently download a 1gb avi movie (and keep my ratios intact).

 

[Sunray]

Still working OK.
Gone up to 13Mbs.

Decided that I'd download firefox 2 on my other pc and got it down in 4 seconds.

 

[cybertect]

Seems I'm 2.406 Km from the exchange and they're estimating only about 8 Mbit downstream (though 1.2 Mbit upstream is very attractive).

 

[Sunray]

That upstream is very very useful. You can blitz ratio sites and come up with a positive ratio without even trying.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Didn't bother with Be in the end. Got a 10 meg Telewest connection. So far we're getting between 6.7 and 8. Splitting the bill means I only pay £7 a month (we've agreed to only do heavy downloads throughout the night). Nice.

 

[Crispy]

Just thought I'd butt in to brag about the 1.81MBps sustained download rate I just got
That's 3 hours of TV down in 7 minutes.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

1.8? I just did the adsl guide speed test (or ThinkBroadband as it's now known) and got 7.5mbps...

 

[Dandred]

I laugh at you all with my Korean connection at 100mb/s



But it doesn't work outside of Korea

 

[Crispy]

That's 1.8 M(Byte)ps, on a 18M(bit)ps line

 

[Kid_Eternity]

That's 1.8 M(Byte)ps, on a 18M(bit)ps line

Ah I see. Who are you with?

 

[Crispy]

Ah I see. Who are you with?

*Glances meaningfully at thread title*

 

[Kid_Eternity]

D'oh! Wait, I thought Be was mbps not mbs?

 

[Crispy]

??

Just different ways of measuring. 8 Mbps = 1 MBps
So in my case, I was using 8*1.8=14.4Mbps which is near capacity (given overheads) for my 18Mbps line

 

[Kid_Eternity]

oh right, brain obviously isn't working right today...

 

[Jambooboo]

Had Be now since the beginning of the week.

Getting around 12Mbs down and 1.25Mbs up. Surfing is obviously very quick, while Bittorent moves at a fair pace. Not been downloading much but when I did I was getting around 700kbps using Utorrent, though I suspect that this is far from the max down. I've been seeding non-stop since I got it and have already added about 50gb upload to my stats at private trackers.

So far so good. Was simultaneously seeding/downloading with Utorrent, with me playing Xbox Live and Mrs Jambooboo surfing the net, all with no problems and great speeds (no lag/stuttering on Live and pages loading up very quickly on the PC).

Nothing to do with Be or anything but I'm a bit disappointed that I seem to have lost some speed since I changed things over from a wired Ethernet connection between the PC and router, to a wireless USB dongle set-up. I'd expected to sacrifice a little speed but for example my upload speed with Utorrent now seems to waver between 70-90kbps, while with the wired connection it was running between 110-130kbps.

 

[Crispy]

your be box should have ethernet sockets no?

 

[Radar]

I think the point is he was previously using wired, kicked over to wireless (probably for convenience) and is now bemoaning the fact that wireless appears slower. If its not plain 802.11b then it shouldn't be the slowest part of the link.

However USB WiFi dongles are notoriously inefficient

 

[cybertect]

Upon checking, it seems my exchange has been moved back from November to January.

 

[Jambooboo]

your be box should have ethernet sockets no?

It's as Radar puts it.

I'm using a Netgear WG111 (which came free with a DG834 I was previously using before I got the Bebox). I guess it's just not very good (it doesn't exactly get positive reviews on Amazon) as the wizard is only giving a 70% signal, despite being less than 3m away from the Bebox.

I'll probably get a wireless card to see if it makes a difference.

 

[Radar]

I'll probably get a wireless card to see if it makes a difference.

Give me a shout if you're in London.. I have both the Netgear WPN311 and WPN511, you're welcome to a loan of either for a couple of days testing. At least you'll know if they help the situation before you spend anything

 

[Sunray]

I found the master socket, in my room as it happens and unscrewed the face plate disconnecting the extensions in the house and plugged the modem into the test socket and got 16Mbs, only 2 gaps.

Thats not so bad, but still not max'ed out the 12Mbs connection yet apart from the odd download site like Sourceforge.

 

[Crispy]

uknova did it for me - 6 episodes of QI at the same time, 3-400kBps a piece

 

[Sunray]

Well, I am a happy customer. These guys go down as recommended.

Just downloading Vista DVD off the Microsoft premier site, I've an MSDN subscription, and I am currently getting 1.3Mb second.

 

[cybertect]

I just got confirmation through that I'm going to be transferred to BeThere Unlimited on 24 April...