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Be broadband offers ADSL2+ trial in London

Applespider

Applespider

macrumors G4
Original poster
Jan 20, 2004
10,939
1
looking through rose-tinted spectacles...
Register reports that Be broadband are looking for triallists for ADSL2+ which gives speeds of 24Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream.

Sign up now and you apparently get it free til the end of September and then only £20 a month with no caps and free wifi modem. Unfortunately my exchange isn't scheduled to be enabled til December although I have signed up for the service to get the earlybird price. I reckon that if the service should prove dreadful in October/November, I can always cancel! ;)

Incidentally, for those using BT broadband currently, if you call up and have a moan at them for slowness of upgrade and potential of cap coming in, they'll knock a bit of your prices. They took £7 off my bill for each of the next 4 months without any ties to new contracts.
 
TheRegister is bolloxed for me also.
Maybe its Safari let me find Firefox.
Safari update appears to have borked TheRegister,have signed up but a bit wary after seeing complaints about Bulldog.
O.K. dumped cache and works fine in Safari now.Sorry about little conversation with my self here. :eek:
 
Wow...

Safari working ok for me on the register. Definitely interested in this. Our BT line doesn't get connected until the 6th (just moved) but it says they are accepting until the 18th. £20 for unlimited use plus wi-fi router is good by any standards, let alone at those speeds. :eek:

Good spot applespider!

Edit: Just read the link on that site to the Offcom-Bulldog story.

Without doubt, Bulldog is the worst comms company ever, I hope it goes seriously bust.
 
Great news for ADSL users, like Wintermute I'm waiting for my 10MB upgrade. The problem with all of these uber-fast home connections to me seems to be that the web servers can still only deliver content at a limited rate, so even if you do have 10MB or even 24MB down, who the hell will actually be able to send you data that fast. Not many places I'm willing to bet.
 
I just got my 10mbps/adsl2+ plan from ISP, that speed can only be achieved mostly to the ISP own network, at other network especially to overseas server, the highest I got is roughly about 6mbps. It usually would hovers around 1.7mbps. That's for my ISP.

but as usual, my ISP rolled out a data plan without doing any real-world testing, now I am plagued with disconnection, and slow connection speed at peak hours.
 
I'm stuck with ISDN at home! Not only is it slow, it's a bloody rip off!

Anyone know any good Satellite broadband ISPs? :p

24Mbps, Lucky sods :rolleyes:
 
I'm moving to the UK...

Paying more than that on my 4 Mbps downstream cable, 384 kbps upstream.


I WANT 1 Mbps UPSTREAM! :'(
 
GFLPraxis said:
I'm moving to the UK...
Paying more than that on my 4 Mbps downstream cable, 384 kbps upstream.
I WANT 1 Mbps UPSTREAM! :'(
Click to expand...

Before you book those flight tickets bear in mind that it's only in London, it's a trial and you need to be within 1km of the exchange to get close to those speeds. And the additional cost of housing, petrol and Macs in rip-off Britain™ hugely outweigh the relative cheapness of this! :p
 
Applespider said:
Before you book those flight tickets bear in mind that it's only in London, it's a trial and you need to be within 1km of the exchange to get close to those speeds. And the additional cost of housing, petrol and Macs in rip-off Britain™ hugely outweigh the relative cheapness of this! :p
Click to expand...

All true. I live in south west London about 800-1000 metres from the exchange and my ADSL 1 connection sucks. They claim my line is terrible even though the flats were built in the past 10 years. As a result I'm limited to 512/256 until BT can sort themselves out. I've tried complaining but nobody has helped me much grrrrr... Pipex sent me an email after I complained about 5 times saying they had reduced my monthly fee to £9.99. Then I called and they said it was £19.99 so I'm confused as to whether it was a typo or they were feeling bad that my connection is weak.
 
Wes said:
They claim my line is terrible even though the flats were built in the past 10 years. As a result I'm limited to 512/256 until BT can sort themselves out.
Click to expand...

The easiest way to check how bad your connection, if you don't believe them, is to check the SNR ratio and the line attenuation on your ADSL connection. You should be able to see them from your modem's toolkit. You want a high SNR ratio and a low line attenuation.

BT's limits are a line attenuation downstream of 60 or less to get 1MB and 43 or less to get 2MB.
 
Hmm... is somebody lying?
 

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Applespider said:
Before you book those flight tickets bear in mind that it's only in London, it's a trial and you need to be within 1km of the exchange to get close to those speeds. And the additional cost of housing, petrol and Macs in rip-off Britain™ hugely outweigh the relative cheapness of this! :p
Click to expand...
At the moment anyway. Apparently, I can get it Jan06 in Birmingham.
 
Wes said:
Hmm... is somebody lying?
Click to expand...

It certainly looks like it should support higher than 512!
This link has a comparison of the stats from different manufacturers and Netgear were a little out but even if your line attenuation was doubled, it should be OK.
What does the BT line checker say when you put your number on btbroadband site? Your numbers look very close to mine and it's confident that I can get 2Mbps once BT get their finger out!

Unfortunately physical distance from the exchange doesn't mean much since you could be at the wrong end of a long loop. Those stats look very odd though if that's the case
 
They say I can get 2 megabit online but Pipex sent me an email a while back saying that's not the case. Armed with this info I'll send them ANOTHER email. :)

According to that other site I am 1.05Km from the exchange.
 
edesignuk said:
Great news for ADSL users, like Wintermute I'm waiting for my 10MB upgrade. The problem with all of these uber-fast home connections to me seems to be that the web servers can still only deliver content at a limited rate, so even if you do have 10MB or even 24MB down, who the hell will actually be able to send you data that fast. Not many places I'm willing to bet.
Click to expand...
I'm willing to sacrifice myself for you :p My exchange is enabled so I'm gonna sign up - I'll let you all know what it's like (assuming I can get online of course ;) B***D*g anyone?)
 
Wes said:
They say I can get 2 megabit online but Pipex sent me an email a while back saying that's not the case. Armed with this info I'll send them ANOTHER email. :)

According that other site I am 1.05Km from the exchange.
Click to expand...
Have you tried here to see if your exchange is OK? BT and my ISP were in an argument about who borked my exchange, and then magically it was upgraded to 2mb/s. Keep trying at Pipex ;)
 
Hmm there appear to be no outages or any problems at my exchange, how irritating.
 
Wes said:
All true. I live in south west London about 800-1000 metres from the exchange and my ADSL 1 connection sucks
Click to expand...
So? A friend of mine is denied broadband for living too far away, yet the local BT place is across the road. He can run a Kat5 cable from his house, but they still deny him access
 
edesignuk said:
The problem with all of these uber-fast home connections to me seems to be that the web servers can still only deliver content at a limited rate, so even if you do have 10MB or even 24MB down, who the hell will actually be able to send you data that fast.
Click to expand...


True, but you don't have to only download from one server. I've got ADSL2+ at home so I can transfer large files between home, work and uni. It's not near 24Mbps but it's still pretty big. It keeps up with browsing at least. :)
 
Could be worth trying. Live in london and am currently with bulldog and whilst i concede that the service is certainly bad the line itself is pretty damn quick!
 
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