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The only thing that can combat such practices is healthy competition and luckily that's where BE Unlimited come in.
This is going to be a long review but bear with me. Hopefully at the end of it, worst case scenario is that you may understand how to get the best out of your current service ... Read review
Advantages: High Speed Internet at Low Speed prices Disadvantages: supplied wiress routers are sub-standard
...competition and luckily that's where BE Unlimited come in.
This is going to be a long review but bear with me. Hopefully at the end of it, worst case scenario is that you may understand how to get the best out of your current service provider.
Ideally you will see the light and do what I did and move to BE Unlimited.
'''Who Is BE?'''
BE Unlimited is one of the lesser known broadband suppliers who ... .../> I joined BE Unlimited because of the high speeds promised on their website and because at that time I had not yet read a single negative review about them whilst I’d read many negative reviews about EVERY OTHER internet service provider.
BE Unlimited is one of only 3 companies in the UK that supply broadband using ADSL2+ technology; the other 2 being Bulldog and O2. Incidentally BE is now owned by O2 so I guess there are now ... more
Generally speaking most internet service providers are a bunch of cowboys. They’ll sign you up for 12 to 18 months, promising download speeds superior to those of their competitors but once you’ve signed up, the reality is that you will most likely get a fraction of the speeds that they claimed you would get.
The only thing that can combat such practices is healthy competition and luckily that's where BE Unlimited come in.
This is going to be a long review but bear with me. Hopefully at the end of it, worst case scenario is that you may understand how to get the best out of your current service provider.
Ideally you will see the light and do what I did and move to BE Unlimited.
Who Is BE?
BE Unlimited is one of the lesser known broadband suppliers who I migrated to after having been a customer of Orange for a number of years.
I left just over 2 years ago after suffering close to a month of unreliable internet access having had no issues at all for the 5 or 6 years that I'd been with them previously.
That single month of problems was a huge issue for me because I work from home and internet access is the only way I can do what my company pays me to do so I gave Orange my notice and cancelled my contract.
I joined BE Unlimited because of the high speeds promised on their website and because at that time I had not yet read a single negative review about them whilst I’d read many negative reviews about EVERY OTHER internet service provider.
BE Unlimited is one of only 3 companies in the UK that supply broadband using ADSL2+ technology; the other 2 being Bulldog and O2. Incidentally BE is now owned by O2 so I guess there are now only 2 suppliers of ADLS2+. BT hope to roll it out themselves as part of the 21CN project this year but they are actually a few years behind BE.
The Technology
What is ADLS2+ you may ask?
Well although I’m an IT consultant this stuff is slightly out of my field. My understanding is that ADSL2+ sends twice the number of bits (data) that go up and down the copper wire between your house and the BT exchange. It also uses a broader frequency range to standard ADSL. The upshot of this is that you can get theoretical download speeds of up to 24Mbs and upload speeds of up to 3.5Mbs. ADSL in contrast cannot give you speeds greater than 8Mbs download and 1Mbs upload. Those limits are fixed by the technology not by the service providers.
Not all areas can get ADSL2+. Only those exchanges that have been unbundled from BT by the ISP can potentially use ADSL2+. If BT is still in charge of the exchange then you will get ADSL.
Fortunately the BE Unlimited website (www.bethere.co.uk) has a postcode/phone number search facility that will tell you whether you can get ADLS2+ and if so the likely speeds that you can achieve.
Now this is the bit that rarely gets explained properly to the end customer but the speed indicated on any ISP’s website is almost certainly the best optimistic calculation. It is based mostly on the distance that you house is from the nearest exchange. However even that is only the theoretical speed. The actual speed will then depend on the quality of the copper wire between the exchange and your house and also the quality of the internal wiring within your house from the BT Master Socket onwards. Poor quality extensions for instance can affect the speed you get. The speed you get can also be affected by other devices that operate in a similar frequency range and therefore generate interference. Digital cordless phones, microwave ovens and even christmas lights have been known to dramatically impact on the speed you get for your broadband. Not only that but what your neighbour gets up to can impact on the speed you get for your broadband!!
Going off-topic for a moment here’s a little tip for everyone; one that I picked up from the BE Unlimited user forum. If you are confident enough to do this, try opening up the BT Master Socket. This is the white box most probably closest to your front door into which the BT phone cable connects to from outside your house. Chances are when you open up this socket you will see a few different coloured wires, some of which (perhaps as few as 2) are connected to the actual socket. The rest will most likely be disconnected and tied back in a loop to keep them out of the way. Among those disconnected wires there will most likely be an Orange coloured wire. This is called the ‘Bell Wire’ and would normally be used to transmit the ring signal to any other phone connected in your house via an extension cable. These days most people have cordless phones and if the orange wire is not connected to anything then it can be cut all the way back to the cable's insulation. It’s worth cutting those wires back especially the orange one because they act as antennae and cause interference; not enough to be noticeable during a phone call but enough to reduce your broadband speed by ½ to 1 Mbs. In addition, connect your router to the BT Master Socket. If you connect it to an extension socket then that will again reduce the speed you get by a further ½ to 1 Mbs.
If you are battling with your ISP regarding the speed you get in your house compared to that advertised by the ISP then chances are that these 2 issues alone will be responsible for the discrepancy between what the ISP has promised and what you actually get.
The Packages
Anyway back to BE.
BE offer a number of different packages with the difference being the speed that they offer.
* The cheapest package is BE Value which offers up to 8Mbs for £13.50 a month.
* BE Unlimited offers up to 24Mbs upload speeds along with 1.3Mbs download for £17.50 a month
* The top package called BE Pro offers up to 24Mbs download and 2.5Mbs upload along with a static IP address which is essential for anyone trying to host a website from home all for £21.50 a month.
All 3 packages come with a wireless router (which I’ll come back to later) and all 3 packages offer optional email addresses at an additional cost of £2 per month. BE also impose absolutely no restrictions on the amount of data that you can download, hence the name BE Unlimited and unlike companies like Virgin there is no throttling of speeds during peak times if you download more than a certain amount.
Uniquely they also do not tie you into a contract. They merely ask that you give them 3 months notice if you decide to terminate your account with them which is very reasonable.
Getting Started
Moving to any service provider involves going to through the same basic steps. If you are already with a provider then you need to obtain a ‘MAC’’ code from them. This is the broadband equivalent of the PAC code you get when changing mobile phone providers. Once you have this, you simply give it to your new provider and they will get the ball moving
If this is the first time you are enabling broadband on your line then things are even easier. The service provider will activate broadband on your line and you will be good to go. In this case BE like all other ISPs will charge a connection fee which is about £30
In my case I got my MAC code from Orange, registered with BE and within a few days had switched over. During the switching over phase, I was kept informed by BE with regards to the progress and they despatch the router to you so that it arrives the day before you are due to go live with them.
Connecting up the router is a doodle. BE do not issue any user names or passwords. If you have your own router you can simply use that instead. All you do is plug it into you BT Socket and you're good to go (assuming they have connected you at the exchange).
When you first sign up to BE they warn you that the speeds you get will be erratic. The reason is that they will be trying out different configuration settings at their end to get the most out of your line. This takes about a week. Once things have stabilised the speed you end up with is essentially the best speed that THEY can get to you given the quality of the cable between the exchange and your house and the quality of your internal wiring.
True to their word a week later I had a stable internet connection although it was no where near as fast as I thought it would be which I’ll talk about in a moment.
The Service
So what’s the service like ? Do they actually deliver the speeds that they promise ? Well the thing is that they don’t actually promise anything. They tell you what speeds you could get in theory but if the wiring in your house is sub-standard then they can hardly be blamed if you don’t get the speeds that they said you could. If BT’s cable from the exchange to your house is 50 years old and has degraded then that is something that is beyond their control.
I’ve been with them now for over 2 years. All this took me about a year to fully understand. I spent the first 6 months fighting with BE support about speeds and the next 6 months reading posts on the BE user forum and trying to understand all the things that could have an impact on my connection. I’ve now spent that last year telling everyone I know what a great service provider they are!
In my case my theoretical speed was 17Mbs because I live just a couple of hundred meters away from my exchange. In reality I received 4Mbs. This was faster than Orange but a huge disappointment because I wrongly expected so much more. After many weeks of complaining to BE, I eventually joined the user forum where I found many other people with similar problems to me. At that time BE Support were inundated with support calls all complaining about speed. The call centre is based in Bulgaria and the fact that it was in a foreign country also gave rise to what in hindsight were unfair posts (including some from me) casting aspersions on the competency of the support team.
Over the next few months I came to understand how things beyond the control of the ISP can affect your internet speeds. I cut the unconnected wires in the master socket, I played around with different makes of microfilters and downloaded software to tweak the settings of the computers in my house. Eventually I managed to get speeds consistently of 8Mbs with the occasional burst of 11/12Mbs which I’m happy with. I’m now pretty certain that the remaining difference between what I should get and what I actually get is due to the fact that the BT cable connected to my house was laid down in 1957 and is over 50 years old. BT will get around to replacing that eventually. I regularily see BT's Open Reach vans near my house and I can only presume it is because people are having problems with their phones and/or internet connections. Eventually I hope BT will get fed up of sending engineers out every couple of days and just replace all the cables in our area.
No ISP is perfect, least of all BE. There are a number of issues that I still have problems with. Unfortunately I see no chance of them doing anything about those and for completeness I need to detail those here.
The Router
They supply a Thompson Speedtouch 780 router for free though if you leave and do not return it they will charge you £100. The router is very poor. It will connect you to the internet but that is about it. It will periodically overheat and reset itself which is damn annoying if you are in the middle of download/uploading a large file. It's even more annoying if you are in the middle of a web conference !!.
If you connect more than 3 or 4 devices to it, it will reset. If you have a movie on you PC and you stream it to you TV using say an Xbox it will reset itself. I asked BE to replace it but they wouldn’t admit that there was a problem with it. Reading their user forum it is clear that the router is simply not fit for purpose but BE continue to supply it. I guess we can’t argue too much. It is free after all. In the end I purchased a Netgear DG834N and have not had any issues with since.
The Support Team
Although the support team do the best that they can, it takes a long time for them to start taking you seriously. They read from a script so any thing that is reported to them results in you having to jump through hoops before they’ll really take notice. They get you to reset your router, reboot your PC, go through configuration settings on your PC, get you to apply firmware updates to your router, get you to connect the router to the BT Test Socket etc. all this takes days at a time. If they could be more flexible to problem solving then discussions with them would get much less heated.
The Billing Team
They make mistakes with the invoicing so you have to be constantly on the ball. The VAT reduction was an excellent example. In almost everyone’s case they forgot to apply the VAT reduction and kept ‘forgetting’ until each person contacted them on an individual basis.
Verdict
BE Unlimited is in my opinion the best overall supplier of broadband in the UK. They promise up to 3 times the download speed of their competitors and have the technology to back it up. They are unfortunately let down by poor wiring within older homes and antiquated degraded cabling laid down in some places over 50 years ago by BT but if you are willing to put a little time into getting your internal wiring improved then all things being equal BE offer 3 times the speed for the same price as their competitors
They are also let down by the make and model of router that they supply and by a support team that cannot think outside the scripts that they are forced to read from.
In their defence I would say that all ISP's suffer from the same problem. Also in their defence they have a first class user forum with users who are very knowledgeable with regards to issues related to broadband. Some of those users are ex and current BT personnel and they are always more than willing to help out anyone who posts a thread detailing their specific problem. These guys are so good, most users don't even bother raising issues with the support team because they can get a much faster response from the user forum!!
Recently BE were purchased by O2 who offer similar packages and pricing to BE but the two networks are still distinct and the user forum on the O2 site is apparently no where near as useful to people as the BE forum.
I would recommend BE to anyone fed up with poor service and slow speeds from their current service provider. Once the other ISP's wake up to a mass migration of subscribers then perhaps they will start treating their customers with a little more respect.
Contact Details
Website
www.bethere.co.uk
Sales Support
24/7 sales assistance Sales hotline-0808 101 3424
Member Support
24/7 member assistance Member hotline-0808 101 3430
