BE Broadband Announces Landline Pricing, Cheaper Than BT

Today BE has announced the pricing of our soon to be launched landline service. Rather than focusing on complicated bundles and pricing, BE have created a simple, low price landline service for people who would rather concentrate on broadband goodness than landline calls.

To keep things simple, BE landline contracts will be tied to the length of broadband contracts, and contracts will not be automatically renewed without customer consent.

Tom Williams, MD of BE Broadband, said: “We’ve responded to our members’ requests to provide landline and have delivered it in a way that focuses on giving consumer’s control – no excessively long contracts, no automatic contract renewals, and no unnecessary bundling of features that increase the cost to the customer. We want people to be able to get on with living their online lives with minimal disruption, and the launch of the new landline service will help us to achieve this.”

Top Reasons to sign up to BE landline:

• High-quality broadband with speeds up to 24meg from a company recently named ‘Best Consumer Broadband’ by the ISPA
• Your broadband and landline rolled up into one easy bill
• No need to pay for calls and add-ons if you don’t need them.
• CSV Downloads of your itemised calls to keep your accountant happy
• Choose from 3 packages (basic landline, evening & weekends, and anytime) based on your own needs
• You will pay less than you would pay to BT (especially since BT have announced they will be increasing their prices from October 2010). See BE’s fancy comparison table below:

	BE Broadband	BT
Landline (only pay for what you use to call)	£9.50	£13.24*
Evening & Weekends	£10.50	£13.24**
Anytime (Free calls to UK numbers plus 600 free minutes to over 20 countries)	£13.50	£18.23***
New installations	£85	£127.99

* BT Standard Line Rental. Currently £11.54 a month with Direct Debit with £1.50 payment processing fee levied by BT Payment Services Limited, plus £1.25 without paper-free billing discount
** BT Unlimited Weekend Plan. Standard Line rental payable. Exclusive of Evening calls, which cost 1.5p/minute and daytime calls 5.9p/min, with a 9.9p call set-up fee payable
*** BT Unlimited Anytime Plan. Currently £4.99 a month with Standard Line rental payable

Data is accurate at time of publishing.

Go, Go Gadget BE Social!

This week saw the latest in our successful series of socials, where BE members descended on The Crown and Two Coachmen pub to meet other members, meet the BE team and – most importantly – to show off their gadgets.

Yes, for this month’s BE Social we ran a ‘gadget and hacks’ show and tell, where attendees brought along their favourite bit of kit. As well as your token iPhones (including the infamous iPhone4, bumper and all), we were given exclusive looks at upcoming Android apps, a Powermat (wireless charging device), Matt’s hacked Joggler device (which he has already managed to break), and a variety of tablet-sized e-readers that were called “iPads” or something.

We were quite excited to someone from LINX as well as the Internet (from Matt’s House) in attendance.

Here’s a few photos from the night before things got a bit blurry:



It was sort of like the Gadget Show, but with better gadgets. And beer.

We’re keen to run another gadget show and tell, with perhaps a few giveaways next time, so keep an eye on this blog, or our Twitter or Facebook pages for details of the next BE Social.

If you went to the BE Social, what was your favourite gadget on display? If you came along to the next BE Social, what kind of gadgets would you want to get to play with? What’s your current favourite gadget? Leave your answers in the comments below.

Tom Talks about Fibre - part two

This update is from Tom Williams, Managing Director of BE Broadband.


We were stunned by the number of responses we had to The Great Fibre Survey by the time it closed last Monday. BE members in their thousands turned up at the online polls to have their say.

We learned a great deal about you, our members. There are many who want to wait for the fibre product to mature – you’re happy with your speeds and won’t pay more until fibre guarantees insanely fast speed and great support. But there are also customers who are desperate...and those who just love to try new stuff.

There are also lots of you who took the opportunity to educate Elizabeth, who read through all the comments, on the nutritional value of fibre and its molecular makeup. And there was one haiku.

So, what’s next? We have a lot of insight – we’ve got lots of graphs and at least two .ppt presentations so far. We think we know what’s important (shout out to upload speed) in the development of this product. We just need, now, to find a cost-effective way of getting it to you.

That’s where we’re at. We hope to give you more updates soon.

Thank you so much for taking the survey.

All the best –
Tom @ BE

BE’s thoughts on the latest broadband research from industry watchdog Ofcom

Tom Williams, Managing Director of BE Broadband, responds to today's announcement.

National news sites and social networks have been packed with news about Ofcom's latest report on UK broadband speeds.

We wanted to talk about the report specifically from the perspective of BE and its significance for our members:

UK broadband speeds have increased over the past year
Good stuff. You want fast speeds, and that's what we want to give you. The report shows that BE (along with our parent company O2) is the fastest DSL provider across the board, at all times of the day. We describe it as 'real world speed' and we'll do whatever we can to make yours faster.

Actual speeds are generally well below the advertised rate
There are lots of factors that come between actual speeds and the theoretical maximum. That said, the first step in the process of ordering BE is a line check to estimate your speed. You currently can't order BE without getting an estimate of the speed your phone line will deliver. We'll continue to do this, and we're signed up to the improved Code of Practice too.

Our download speeds at peak times don't fall as much with other ISPs
Ofcom's report said that we showed little or no slowdown during peak hours, indicating lower levels of contention. Which is nice.

Download speeds aren't everything
Upload speeds, latency, packet loss and jitter all affect the experience of a broadband service. The report highlights that we "offered faster upload speeds than comparable services from other DSL operators and Virgin Media's cable services", and also that we had some of the lowest latency and packet loss compared to other providers.

Ofcom have introduced a strengthened Voluntary Code of Practice on Broadband Speeds
We're signed up to the Code of Practice, which means that with BE will continue to explain to new customers what speeds they are likely to obtain in practice, and also to tell them what steps they can take to improve their broadband performance.

Ofcom agrees with the advice we're giving through Matt's House...
Ofcom said "many consumers could take relatively simple steps (such as fitting an iPlate or microfilters) to improve their broadband performance". They've published a consumer guide on their website, but wouldn't you rather watch our Matt talking to the internet directly?

You can read the report here if you want to dig deeper into the stats and findings.

As always - love to hear what you think in the comments. Tell your friends too, they might be using one of the slower providers and not realise what’s possible when you’re with BE.

Get Real World Speed with Help from Matt’s House

Many people don't get the best possible speeds from their broadband due to reasons they aren’t even aware of, such as bad wiring, noise on their line, or a busy wireless channel. And that upsets us.

At BE, we’re excited about our members getting the best broadband experience possible. There’s one person who gets particularly excited…

Some say that the outline of his left nipple is exactly the same shape as a router, and that when online the internet controls his breathing... all we know is, he's called Matt and he’s our forum manager.

(Our apologies to Top Gear)

Matt is fanatical about getting fantastic speeds from broadband connections no matter how far away they are from the exchange or how faulty the wiring is. We’re not quite sure how he does it (and by the looks of the videos, we didn’t really want to ask), but we’ve managed to persuade Matt to share with us some of his tip top tips for getting the most out of your broadband.

Along with a series of guides, there’s a couple of videos introducing how Matt sees the world - generally a bit like The Matrix with slightly less leather gear. We’ve embedded the first in the series below, ‘Tweaking Router’, to give you an idea of how Matt’s tips can help improve your broadband experience:



You can download all of the guides and watch the rest of the videos at www.bethere.co.uk/mattshouse.

We hope you enjoy the videos but mostly find the guides helpful and full of practical tips for improving your broadband speeds. But if you do need further help, you can often find Matt in the BE member forums, on our Facebook page, or he often replies at our twitter stream over at @bebroadband.

Which of the Matt’s House guides has worked best for improving your Real World Speed? Have you got any tips on how to improve your broadband connection? What was the most disturbing aspect of the videos for you? Let us know in the comments.

Tom Talks about Fibre

This update is from Tom Williams, Managing Director of BE Broadband.


BE recently ran its quarterly Customer Satisfaction survey. I think this was my favourite member comment:

FTTC xx

We know you want faster speed; we know you want fibre. Admittedly, we’ve been rather quiet on the topic… mainly because we know how important it is. Although we recognise that it really is the key next step in the evolution of broadband, we don’t want to make promises that we’re unable to keep.

It’s time we said something, though, right?

We really want to offer you a fibre solution. We want to keep providing faster and faster speeds. However, we can’t afford to lay our own fibre network (unless, of course, Alex agrees to sell his collection of antique Happy Meal toys). Right now, we’re looking at the wholesale products available.

If we do this, then there’s likely to be some initial restrictions on what we can offer in terms of speed, support, and the general customer experience. But, for many of you, it will be faster.

Whatever we offer, it won’t be perfect straight away – though it will improve over time. We want to get your input while we’re investigating the options: we want to build the BE fibre product around you as much as possible. So, we’ve got a survey. We’d appreciate it if you could fill it out.

If you have thoughts that you’d like to share (preferably about fibre), visit The Great BE Fibre Survey.

Thanks for reading.

All the best,

Tom @ BE

BE Social July - Back in London

Fresh from our win at the ISPA Awards, we’ll be running the next in the series of our popular BE Socials at the end of the month.

The next BE social is taking place on Wednesday 28th July from 6:00pm at The Crown and Two Chairmen in Soho, London (Map).

Sign up here: http://besocialjuly.eventbrite.com/

Whether you’re new to the BE Socials, or you’ve been a stalwart since the beginning, you might be pleasantly surprised at this one – because we’re doing it a little differently.

This time we’ll be running a gadget and hacks show and tell, and we want you to bring along your favourite bit of kit. Whether it’s your new iPhone 4 (just make sure you hold it the right way) or a hacked version of your HTC Desire running on Ubuntu with a custom git hub repository (or something), bring it along and show it off to your fellow BE members.

We’ll also have a few of our own gadgets to wow you with, so you might see something you’ve never seen before.

So come along, grab a drink (it’s our round) and have a good chin wag. It’ll be just like The Gadget Show, but with better gadgets.

And beer.

See you there!

- Everyone @ BE