My BE* experience!

Hi guys, Back from a long hiatus and it seems that lots have been happening recently - minishorts dissing centerpide, the Xiaxue vs Malaysian bloggers TOILET fiasco, news of Malaysians making love in TOILETS and loving it, the Dawn Yang admiration...did I miss anything else? Anyway, the reason I was MIA's b'cos of my internet connection! I signed up about 1.5 months ago for the BE* 24Mbps ADSL2+ pilot programme and only just got it like 1.5 weeks ago. Was really excited when I first got the modem/router (which was provided free) but once I plugged my phone line to the modem/router, I was terribly disappointed with speeds of only about 1.7-1.9Mbps! But it felt significantly faster than my old 1Mbps connection. So upon finding out more about ADSL2+, I found that the speed depends on how far you are from the telephone exchange, where they have all the equipment! Basically, this graph stolen from yesyes who then stole from Internode shows that there's a drastic drop in speed once you're more than 2km away from the exchange!

So, using this service from samknows, I was able to find the straight line distance from the local exchange to my home and it turned out to be 2.23km! So shouldn't the speed be around 15Mbps? Anyway, common sense tells you that phone lines are never laid straight to each house but goes thru' twists and turns b4 finally reaching one's house. So, how do I check out how far am I from the exchange in terms of phone line distance? Luckily, this guy from yesyes somehow managed to come out with this graph which shows the line attenuation (a stat which can be found in the modem provided/if you have some equipment to measure it but some liken it to 'noise' in the lines) and can roughly tell you how far you are from the exchange: As one of the unlucky ones, my line turns out to have an attenuation of about 52dB and as you can see my max speed in theory could be about 5.5Mbps. But in reality, London copper wires are so old and they differ in quality so much, you would be lucky to get 3/4 of that speed! So like any Malaysian would do, I complained and in less than 2 hours I got a reply saying that they'll look into it and that was on Saturday! Another 4-5 hours later, I got another email from their customer service guy telling me to switch on my modem and leave it on (at about 1 or 2am in the morning). And on Sunday, I suddenly saw the modem rebooting by itself and voila - it's 2.6Mbps (not quite the 24Mbps advertised but I'm pretty contented now after not having internet access for more than a month)! Download speeds without download accelerators are about 170-260kBps using Opera, bittorrent reached a max of 220kBps using utorrent and so hopefully my speed will go up some more.

Drawing conclusions from a forum where there's lotsa ppl with BE* connections comparing connections, it seems that speeds range from 2-22Mbps! So, if you are less than 1km away from the exchange, it's really a good deal to get this since it's only £20/month with a free modem/router (Speedtouch 716WL) that comes with built-in wireless-g capability and also 4 Ethernet/LAN ports and best thing is there's no contract involved (except that you have to notify them 3 months before you decide to call it quits) - perfect for students!

So, in summary:

Pros:

• Pretty good customer service (they even work on weekends!),
• friendly management who even visits forums and updates customers on the progress of the pilot programme
• decent speed for the price (£24) even when you're as far away from the exchange as me.
• free modem/router (saves you about £99)
• no contract
• 'unlimited' downloads (though they say somewhere in the TOS that if you exceed 500GB, they might have to do something about it)
• 1 month free line rental if you sign up through me

Cons:

• Speed greatly differs depending on how far away you're from the local exchange so check the graphs and websites b4 making a decision!
• It's a pilot programme, so there's no guarantees on reliability (although it seems to be improving)

P.S. Anyway, if anyone actually decided to choose this service, send me an email at boringest_at_gmail.com so that you and me can enjoy 1 month free rental. =)