*cries* 24 Mb ADSL (LLU)

[RavenNight]

As fast as that is at my Sisters college their hall has a 100mb pipe spilt through several rooms, at low usage times the speed is just awesome. I was getting anywhere from 10mb/s down was wicked!!! And she only uses it for MSN *sniff*

[Lee H]

i saw that about the BE offer on el reg yesterday, but something didnt add up to me.

1. BE are a brand new LLU company (AFAIK). They must have some revenue somewhere, as i dont think they're a subsidiary of a bigger organisation.
2. They'll be giving away 24Mbit connections for less than £30 a month, when they could easily do it for more (£100+) to get the enthusiast money in first, and then lower the prices once demand has levelled.
3. They'll be giving away a wifi router/modem worth £120 with each connection free.

Something not right there. Its either a ton of hype, or they've got a killer of a business model.

Here's the "who are" information that you want to see who's behind Be There

About Be
Be Unlimited ("Be") is the UK's new ultra high-speed broadband internet service provider (ISP). The venture was started in October 2004, with the working name Avatar Broadband Ltd., by Boris Ivanovic and Dana Pressman. The company will be deploying its own network in the UK, utilising the Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) EU directive, which allows independent operators to lease incumbent's (British Telecom in the case of the UK market) last mile access infrastructure.

Be is run by a team of experts with extensive experience in the broadband and systems fields. The core team including Boris Ivanovic (Founder and Executive Director) came from BoStream, the largest Swedish DSL operator after Telia (the incumbent) prior to being sold to their largest competitor. They include Jocke Garmer (CIO), Johanna Arvestal (Product Manager) and Rickard Reite (Chief developer). Dana Pressman (Managing Director) has long experience in managing high growth system development organisations with both Oracle and Sapient.

[eloquence]

I get a 6mbit link with a 3km telephone line to my exchange... not 24, but fast enough for downloads to be much faster than any previous connection. The upstream of over 1mbit is handy, too, if you ever want to do remote desktop, P2P, website hosting, etc.
Also, I downloaded several gig a day for a month or so, and Be didn't seem bothered, so currently 'unlimited' really does seem to mean that.
So far I haven't had any problems with them once I got connected (getting connected was a faff, but during that time they seem to have gone a long way to sorting out their tech support issues), so currently I can recommend them to others.

[Blackmage]

im 3KM from my exchange and get 9-11MB A Sec not bad

[Taz]

Are we getting to the point where servers cannot satisfy your DSL bandwidth? Remember that it wasn't that long ago that entire LAN's were built on 10Mbps. I'm just wondering if a 24Mbps DSL line is simply going to show up the weakest links in the chain.

[aidanjt]

@Taz: Of course it is, people think that upstream bandwidth for servers comes cheap and they can all go bandwidth crazy with their isps, it's not worth crap if you have a 100000Gbps FOMGDSL line if you're downloading from a server with 100Mbps burstable bandwidth and 100 people downloading from it.. duh.

[vincent]

the most biggest advantage of having cable Net right now......

Cable connections can take alot more that adsl and etc....

I.E.- NTL's latest trial runs- 100MB
without upgrading the lines

NE ways- i wonder how long Bulldog will hang on before followin da leader

[Stoo]

Ya, it's just a shame TeleNTL aren't cabling more areas so the rest of us can join in...

[javalord]

the most biggest advantage of having cable Net right now......

Cable connections can take alot more that adsl and etc....

I.E.- NTL's latest trial runs- 100MB
without upgrading the lines

NE ways- i wonder how long Bulldog will hang on before followin da leader

Without biting your head off - cable systems currently in the uk (docsis 1.1) cannot handle more than 40mbit/s a download stream. Take a load of users, and you'll find contention on both upstream and downstream is just taking over.

Upgrading to newer docsis standards = ££££££££, its cheaper for them to put a DSLAM line card in the green box and run it straight to your door from there, and more efficient too.

[Ramedge]

Loads of lines don't even support 2MB at the moment, hopefully my 8MB line will

Dont BT decide what lines can support 2mb? Because i didnt used to be able to get 1mb but when BT changes the lik SNR and like auttension limits for 1mb it ment i could get it.
so doesnt this just mean BT have to set a new auttension/SNR limit for 2mb??
i know that there would be problems if your line was really bad but i mean can this be done?
i guess its not this easy.

[Stoo]

The line limits are dictated by the type of equipment at the exchange mainly, as better hardware had been moved into the exchanged, the limits have been relaxed.

Although the limits for 2mbit were put back again because number of line faults reported massively increased after they were relaxed, with the introduction of the Max service the lines can be pretty much left to run as fast as they'll go. (New hardware will let the lines sync at much smaller intervals than before, and the technology has much better fault detection and correction).

However until cable comes in to many more homes, or BT's 21CN surfaces, or LLU takes off a lot more, and more companies either go with FTTH, or cabs in the street, we'll always be way behind Europe and Asia because our old phone lines are just too poor to support anything much faster..

[aidanjt]

thats what happens when you run cheap telephone lines.. BT needs to do major work to their infrastructure if they hope to provide good quality internet through their ATM network.

[Lee H]

We'll always be way behind Europe and Asia because our old phone lines are just too poor to support anything much faster..

Now why didn't BT realise this and use good quality equipment rather than cut corners and try and save a couple of million here and there. Not only that but the use of aluminium cables in certain areas to cut costs now means theres pockets of estates unable to get broadband unless theres an alternative.

Ofcom have just done quite a good study on the next generation of networks and this can be found at the following link ;

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/cond...nfc/statement/

Roll on the future

[TheAnimus]

because BT were the only game in town when it started. Besides they're worried, they sponsered the imagine cup last year, in an effort to get good quality programmers, they outsourced too many jobs, and found that low and behould the quality of work isn't as good.

[Trippledence]

My ISP and exchange support 8meg via IPmax atm, however line length means I am still stuck on 512 How depressing.

[shiato storm]

Looks like the snailspeeds we get at the moment ( 512 Kb/s etc and lower ) are going into the coffin and getting the final nail embedded as we speak with BT and everyone else now rolling out 2 Mb lines.

eh? whats all the fuss about? I'm on 8.1 Mbps