To Be, or Sky that is the question

[SuicidaL]

I say go with Virgin they truly are the best net provider been with them 4 years without a single problem and my 20 meg about to goto 50 meg for free next month! So damn fast and perfect for online gaming and streaming not to mention completly UNCAPPED the only ISP in UK to have true uncapped service.

not quite true, be/o2 are uncapped and unlike vm (who i've just left) there is no stm limits. the limits and times of these (for which there is a lot debate about if you google) are restrictive. the current limits are restrictive enough but the new trial limits (which will in no doubt be brought in) are worse. but worse than that is that they cap your speed by 75% (if your on 20meg to 5 meg) if you go over the cap limit. now currently it's 3gig (up and down combined) which you can hit quite easily.

you say that your going onto the 50meg tier, well good luck with it. if it's anything like when we had the 20meg roll out then there will be problems, and i can't see the stm (which i don't see there not being one) being any less restrictive. and as for gaming, in my experience vm are average. their routing is pants. for instance take cod4 - the route between me and my clans uk server was 12-13 hops and always got (since the 20meg roll out) big packet loss of 30-50% now i've been with o2 for a week now and the same server has 6 hops and hardly any packet loss. now i know things will be different for others, but i've spent the last year complaining about it but nothing has been done - but they are still happy to take the money and run. just wait until you need to speak to tech support eastern division when they know nothing about 50meg.

[Trash Man]

Rather than start a new thread I'd thought I'd ask a question in here about Be.

I've entered my number on their site and it says I can get the service ok. Does this mean I will be able to get faster speeds than 8mb from them? Anyway of finding out what the max speed for my area is?

Thanks for any help.

[b0redom]

It means you can get "up to" 24Mbit/s - in practice, you're unlikely to get that, but yes if you currently have 8Mbit/s you are likely to get a bit faster.

[moogle]

Rather than start a new thread I'd thought I'd ask a question in here about Be.

I've entered my number on their site and it says I can get the service ok. Does this mean I will be able to get faster speeds than 8mb from them? Anyway of finding out what the max speed for my area is?

Thanks for any help.

One second I'll pull up my old posts to help you calculate estimated speed.

Continued:

Ok so I found my old post

Hum, I'll help you here. If you've already got an ADSL2+ ISP you can calculate what speeds you will get if you can find your attenuation. Or just use Samknows Broadband - Comprehensive Broadband Information and check the distance from your exchange. Calculate the distance as the Crow flies and by street. Me to my exchange as the crow flies is 600m but by street its 1.2km and my attenuation calculates my line to be 2km. I get around 16mb though which is nice.

Tell me the distances, crow and street, also try to put your BT phone number in as it makes the exchange finder more accurate, with the postcode they can only guess the nearest exchange is yours but although it may be right you don't want to think you live close to the exchange and then learn yours is further (farther?) than you thought.

[Trash Man]

One second I'll pull up my old posts to help you calculate estimated speed.

Continued:

Ok so I found my old post



Tell me the distances, crow and street, also try to put your BT phone number in as it makes the exchange finder more accurate, with the postcode they can only guess the nearest exchange is yours but although it may be right you don't want to think you live close to the exchange and then learn yours is further (farther?) than you thought.

Thanks for the help

I've found my exchange and clicked my house on the map and gives a distance of 617 meters. Is that street distance or as the crow flys?

It does says Green ADSL2+ available at ~16Mbps
Be Unlimited
O2 broadband
UK Online (incl 20M packages)
Sky Max (LLU) (16M for £10pcm)

I do have Sky TV, would I be better off going with them? Anyone heard anything about Sky as an ISP.?

[moogle]

Thanks for the help

I've found my exchange and clicked my house on the map and gives a distance of 617 meters. Is that street distance or as the crow flys?

It does says Green ADSL2+ available at ~16Mbps
Be Unlimited
O2 broadband
UK Online (incl 20M packages)
Sky Max (LLU) (16M for £10pcm)

I do have Sky TV, would I be better off going with them? Anyone heard anything about Sky as an ISP.?

You should've said you have Sky, it's £10 for their 16meg BB (last time I checked). I say go with them as they are good too. If you don't need a static ip, really low pings and a real fast upload go with them. Don't forget if you have a o2 payg or contract phone you can get Be/o2 broadband for cheaper and faster I think.

Anyway take down the postcode of the exchange and do a google map search and it will give you street distance, then just plot a line to find out how far it is from your house as the crow flies.

[Trash Man]

1.8km by road and about 700m as the crow flys.

[moogle]

1.8km by road and about 700m as the crow flys.

well i get 1.9km by road and 621 as the crow flies for me and according to my attenuation my line is 2km long and I reach speeds (actual) of 2 megabytes/s aka 16mbit. So with sky if your line quality is good you should see 16-14 mb I estimate.

[Blitzen]

I say go with Virgin they truly are the best net provider been with them 4 years without a single problem and my 20 meg about to goto 50 meg for free next month! So damn fast and perfect for online gaming and streaming not to mention completly UNCAPPED the only ISP in UK to have true uncapped service.

I'd love to know how you worked out this statement as its just not true.

=moogle;1430900]If you don't need a static ip, really low pings and a real fast upload go with them.

With SKY i get 25-27 ping. Any lower makes no difference and up to around 40-45 is easily good enough for OLG aswell.

[vrykyl]

Any ideas what il get on Be? Im waiting for connection atm....

According to samknows my exchange is 2307m away from my house, and ADSL2+ available at ~3Mbps
Be Unlimited
O2 broadband
UK Online (incl 20M packages)
Sky Max (LLU) (16M for £10pcm)

and when i put my post code and the exchange postcode into multimap it said by road distance is 2.26 miles.....

atm I get 5.5mb on my standard adsl 8mb max bt/orange broadband line.....I used to get 7mb and 128kb upload....its now 5.5mb down and approx 700kbs up

any ideas?

[chadders]

Be forums are best place, there's a dedicated "speed" sub-forum.

edit: as you've signed up you should have access to their forums.

[Pup]

Moved house recently and wanted to keep Virgin Media cable, but new place couldnt have it so gone the Sky route. Internet finally got activated last night and samknows shows me as 4.9km from my nearest exchange so I didnt have much hope for a decent speed, but was quite pleased when it turned out to give me 2mb.

Only problem the first network hop on a traceroute is 80ms, which isn't so good for fps gaming :/ I'm assuming thats down to the distance to my exchange, but going to give it a few days to see how it goes.

[mikkri]

Moved house recently and wanted to keep Virgin Media cable, but new place couldnt have it so gone the Sky route. Internet finally got activated last night and samknows shows me as 4.9km from my nearest exchange so I didnt have much hope for a decent speed, but was quite pleased when it turned out to give me 2mb.

If cabling is good you'll get good speed. That's that simple. Heard somewhere that with ADSL2+ metric distance matters even less than it did with ADSL. Makes sense for me.

[j1979]

ive been with both, can only reconmend O2/Be tho as sky were very poor.

[Instinct]

I vote be or never to be