This post is from Tom Williams, Managing Director of BE Broadband.
Another new service is coming out of BE HQ. Line bonding (two broadband connections acting as a single faster connection) will be available from early February 2010! Since the trial last year, we’ve been working hard to get the service ready for our customers. However, at launch, the product comes with a bit of disclaimer: it’s significantly more complicated to get line bonding running compared to a single connection. That’s why we are going softly softly when we launch. The product is only going to be available to existing Pro members, but we will be including a nice discount for them and we’re only going to be able to handle a small number of orders to begin with, though the product will be available anywhere that the regular BE service is available – about 70% of BT lines.
On a 20Mb/s + line, you should be able to get 40Mb/s + download and 5 ish upload – that’s pretty impressive if you compare with the rest. It also means that if you are on a long line length you’ll be able to achieve around double your current speed – life changing for some!
Pricing is yet to be finalised, but it won’t be cheap – it’s taking quite a lot of overhead and resource to bring the product out which is reflected in the price. We think the connection fee will be around £85 and the discounted cost for existing members around £50-55 per month. At the moment, you’ll need to order a second BT line of course too…
You can get line bonding from other companies, but not for this sort of money and not as easy to set up and robust as the BE product will be. You’ll be able to maximise your gaming experience too turning on fastpath on your line and the experience should be seamless if one line drops for any reason.
If you are interested then please register your details at www.bethere.co.uk/web/beportal/linebonding
On a 20Mb/s + line, you should be able to get 40Mb/s + download and 5 ish upload – that’s pretty impressive if you compare with the rest. It also means that if you are on a long line length you’ll be able to achieve around double your current speed – life changing for some!
Pricing is yet to be finalised, but it won’t be cheap – it’s taking quite a lot of overhead and resource to bring the product out which is reflected in the price. We think the connection fee will be around £85 and the discounted cost for existing members around £50-55 per month. At the moment, you’ll need to order a second BT line of course too…
You can get line bonding from other companies, but not for this sort of money and not as easy to set up and robust as the BE product will be. You’ll be able to maximise your gaming experience too turning on fastpath on your line and the experience should be seamless if one line drops for any reason.
If you are interested then please register your details at www.bethere.co.uk/web/beportal/linebonding
I hope you’ll sign up - you’ll be a true early adopter if you do.
We are always hearing members ask for more speed, so this is a really exciting milestone for us. Reminds me a bit of the early days of ADSL2+…
- Tom
Posts
21 comments:
so, if this was to be priced at £55/mo, this would mean your price for the service would be approx £78/mo incl. line rental! :-/
Costs aside, how does it actually work? Do you provide a specific ADSL modem with the service? If so, please no more Thompson boxen! :-(
bonding two lines at twice the price using obsolete copper phone lines and protecting the copper cabal. I admire BE for trying, but it is totally ridiculous in this day and age. We need fibre to the home and not more copper. The good thing about this is it will generate a lot of money for BT to pay off their pension deficit and then they may consider investing in the infrastructure instead of forcing ISPs to use throttling and capping.
I guess having twice the speed to the exchange won't make much difference, as the exchange bottlenecks will still remain.
This does sound like a good product from BE and I would sign up for it if i did not have to pay BT any more money for another line. On top of that the thought of dealling with a BT call center in India fills me with dread. BT should look at BE's customer service satisfaction and learn somthing for it.
Personally, I think its a great idea.
Think of the redundancy that this provides.
Some people like us have 2 lines, and having bonding will provide us with a more reliable Faster ADSL connection, assuming that someone does not destroy the telephone exchange, but hey ho.
Fibre optic is a long time off, its expensive, and requires a company with last mile capability. These sort of companies are not interested in individuals service and do not care if one or two people lose service. They depend on mass market tactics. You only need to look at the current providers of fibre/last mile to see how they treat their customers in reality.
Well Done BE!
Go yourself Be - is there a reason why Be aren't supplying the second line? Would complete unbundle of such lines not appeal more to Be as costs may be lower and as such might allow your business model to be more flexible?
I do hope it works for you as a company!
Hopefully getting fiber to the cabinet in our town by end of this year. may switch over but it will probably have to be BT. i will be sad to leave BE.
Can I just point something out... maximum speed of 40 for £84 plus two phone lines is nearing the £110 mark. Virgin Media has a 50 connection for £39 INCLUDING the phone line. Now trust me I am no fan of virgin media but given that their 50mb connection is not throttled I would opt for that LONG before this.
I know I am going to get a lot of hate for this comment however, from a business point of view this service is absolutely stupid. Unless you live out in the sticks where VM does not have cable service this product is of no benefit to you. I would be interested to know how many people that actually applies to...
The big problem with Virgin (and many providers) is that they have a horrible upload speed (50mb down, 1.5 up) and they do all sorts of capping, filtering, etc.
BeThere has tried to give customers exactly what they advertise (without oversubscribing and overselling) and it's gotten them pretty far.
Fibre is common in many countries but apparently in London it's a premium luxury. We'd all prefer fibre but that depends on a HUGE infrastructure upgrade that apparently nobody really wants to spend on (including the UK govt, bank bailout = OK, actually improving physical things not so much... though admittedly they should spend money on Hospitals and the Tube before fibre.)
Yes, Bonded ADSL2+M is an intermediate step - but look at how many SDSL resellers are out there! BeThere can leverage their existing infrastructure and take a chunk of the small business and high end home market.
I am pleased to see BE pushing to find new ways to improve performance. However, I would like them to direct their attention at technologies such as FTTC (VDSL2) which will offer significant performance increases, at a more reasonable price. This technology is being aggressively driven by BT OpenReach and is already available in my area. I just need an ISP to support it!
Virgin are by far the worst ISP I've ever used, their customer service is non existant, I wouldn't return to them if they were offering 100Mbps for free. I get 23.6Mbps on my antiquated copper line from Be*, so I'm more than happy, and their customer service is second to none.
There are plenty of towns in the UK where Virgin doesn't have cable eg where I live in Blackpool. Currently this is the cheapest way to increase my Internet speed. It's pricey with the cost of an extra BT line, but I'm still tempted
Virgin do cap, but not on their 50Mb service, which is effectively what Be's line bonding is competing with. I agree though, as Virgin's service is unlimited unlike their other ones, it does make the Be one look a bit pricey.
I'd like to see more interest in FttC from Bethere (as a customer). I live in an area undergoing extensive FttC work (Watford), and will be keen to be using it ASAP.
well i say like most its a good idea but still, to go from £22 p/m for my 18meg to nearly 80 for the line bonding, not a chance. maybe in years to come when BE invest in fiber and the price is decent enough i mite switch packages. but til then im happy where i am.
ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 15899 kbps 1845 kbps
Line Attenuation 28.0 db 13.8 db
Noise Margin 7.0 db 6.2 db
^ my current speeds ^
altho i now live a little further from the exchange than my old flat i still cant complain at that speed for £22, its better than what most offer.
I work for another ISP, much smaller and focuses on business. I had a customer saying he wass leaving us because BE are offering him fttc. Was he talking pants or are BE's business customers being offered this now?
No be are not currently offering FTTC I don't know where they got that information from. Be only supply LLU and over the BT Copper for the last mile. As a Be customer for a few years its a bit of a pain that they aren't able to leap forwards and be miles above the rest but as a current pro customer I would still say they are one of the best providers. I won't be leaping on to the Line Bonding just yet as I can't afford it but as the process becomes more automated and prices drop it will certainly be of intrest (if nothing better has come along). Be have been working hard to provide a good line bonding service and if you think about it, it is still a cut above the rest as there aren't alot of line bonding solutions out there (Done alot of research into this recently because we are moving to 4 x Linebonded SDSL conenctions at work that I am in charge of) And the only product that really offers better then Be's connection would be leased lines and ether connections which are unbeleivably expensive.
Can voip run over a linebonded connection?
The way I understood it was that due to the timing sensitivity of VOIP it was impossible to run bonded. A bit like teleporting. where you would need to re-assemble everything in an identical order forcing serial data transfer rather than parallel ?
And surely there is no redundancy benefit of a bonded session where both connections are through the same ISP? If that ISP has a dodgy server/router or whatever then both go down?
I have 2 ADSL connection one (main one) is BePro with an automatic fallback to UK-Online Router does the juggling and it's virtually seemless in operation. Can't see there is any redundancy benefit of BE-Bonded. Open to education though.
Alot of the times when your connections are dropped its due to the indivdual line and not a Be problem as such there for in that instance Be Line bonding will seamlessly continue working with absolutly no down time. However you are correct if Be had a major issue over at their end the nyou could be cut of completly. For absolutle service it is recommend you use line bonding from more than one provider. For instance Shared band do a line bonding service where you could have 4 x adsl lines and have each one with a different provider but they bond them together. Been doing alot of research on this here at work as we needed something along those lines as we can't get be but that kind of service doesn't exist for adsl 2+. We have recently taking up line bonding here but its 4 x SDSL lines giving us 8MBps each direction.
Oh and as for the VOIP systems they do work perfectly fine over a bonded solution however I think you will find that it will only actually make use of one connection at a time (which ever is the quitest at time of data transfer)
Also has for bonding with different providers you will see increased reliability however you will find that you will loose a bit of performance due to different providers wil have different latency to different locations. There are two ways to go about it:
Option 1 - All with same provider
Best performance as all connections will provide the same performance to each location however if the ISP was to have a magor problem everything would go down but honestly how often does this happen?
Option 2 - Different Providers
The reliability is there from one of the ISPS having a major outage however performance will be hit as different providers located in different parts of the country are all going to have different latency and connections to each location there for not equalling 4 (or 2) identical bonded lines and could end up with connections taking longer than you expect.
Hope this helps
Regards,
Max
Thanks Max.
Brilliant reply which cleared up a few of my concerns.
Thanks again.
Pete
Your welcome. I like to help where I can :-)
Post a Comment