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.

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.

Who Is BE?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

BE offer a number of different packages with the difference being the speed that they offer.

* BE Unlimited offers up to 24Mbs upload speeds along with 1.3Mbs download for £17.50 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.

Getting Started

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 !!.

The Support Team

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