Interview with the first line bonding member at BE broadband

Tom Williams, MD of BE Broadband, caught up with Richard Thompson at the last BE Social to discuss line bonding, house hunting near exchanges, and what it's like to get speeds of up to 46Mbs download and 5.2Mbs upload!

Tom: We’ve just launched line bonding as a product and it’s in its early stages. We’ve contacted a number of customers to take up the service and one of the first is Richard. Richard’s from Bristol and he’s come all the way down to tonight’s meetup in London. So how long have you been connected now?

Richard: Since my exchange very first got enabled, about May 2007.

T: Ah-ha, OK. But line bonding, you ordered it last week?

R: I can remember when the trial was very first announced on the forums, and I can remember trying to sign up to that but it was just for people in London, so I gave up on that. I'd harassed BE team members on the forums about Line Bonding and as soon as there was an announcement about it being available outside of London that I registered my interest and waited to hear back.

T: Well you are the first one on line bonding after the launch. We met you in Bristol a month or two ago, and you went live last week?

R: Yeah, I got an email from Alinna, at about 5:07pm on Thursday night, so I replied to it and they were telling me to phone the line bonding team and I gave them a call about 5:30pm They set me off on the initial process: the modem was shipped out on Friday, the modem was with me on Monday and then I got a phone call about 2 o’clock at work telling me it was ready to go live. So I was like, okay, at 6 o’clock I have to go back!

T: Ah, you were at work?

R: Exactly, because I was at work and I had the modem delivered to work as well and I actually got a call from the courier company as I was driving into work and I wanted to collect it then drive straight back as soon as I got to work to get it home.

It was great, and literally that night I was playing with it online, changing settings etc. Then the next day at work I was connected to my computer and changing settings, phoning up support and they’re like, “Can you reboot?”.I’m like, “Yeah I’ve clicked reboot.” Then they asked "What lights are flashing?" and I replied "Don’t know, I’m at work", which was quite fun.

T: So tell us about the sorts of speeds you’ve been getting.

R: Well before I already had two lines because as soon as line bonding was mentioned I bought the second one. One line was BE Pro, one line was BE unlimited, so I had 24Mbson both lines downstream, and the Pro line had 2.8Mbs up.

T: You must live close to an exchange then?

R: Yeah, I'm sad enough that I chose where to live based on where the exchanges were. When I was looking for flats I found out where the exchanges were, googled that postcode and that's where I was looking. I can actually see the exchange from my balcony.

T: Nice! And then you had 2.8 up?

R: Yeah I had 2.8 on a single line, and that was really, really fast.

T: That's amazing.

R: With bonding what I've found, as is known, there's a chip set limitation on the main line so that you get 20 down, but the other line I find that if I turn on Annex A, I actually get more than 24 meg down – I get up to about 26 meg down, so if I turn on Annex A on the second line rather than Annex M I can get about 46 meg down and about 3.8 up.

But I figure that, well, you’ve got over 40meg, who cares, so I tend to leave the second one on Annex M and have about 44 down and 5.2 up.

People look at Virgin 50 meg, and yes it might have a slightly higher headline speed, but you’ve got about 1 meg upload.

T: That’s amazing, you’re starting to kind of get into the world of next-generation access with the things you can do via that massive bandwidth.

R: It’s only a couple of years back where you got 5 meg downstream, and now I’ve got that upstream. Businesses will pay a grand a month for a 2 meg SDSL line and I’ve got that twice and more.

T: So how do you feel about the amount of money it costs?

R: Well, obviously I’m paying BT for two lines which I’d rather not – I don’t make voice calls, but in total I pay £52 to BE and BT lines are about £12 each, so about £25. So yeah, I’m paying about £75, but at the same time, for me to get any other equivalent service I’d be paying a lot more.

I guess for most people, paying £5 a month for broadband is enough and I think that’s what BE Value is there for. But for me I don’t care. I think value-for-money wise, compared with the BT business account we have at work, using stuff on there is painful. While you may have a 5meg sync, in reality you’ll never get 5 meg at peak times, as the drsox video showed. For a 10Mbs leased line, you’d be paying about 20 grand a year, so £52 a month is absolutely fine.

T: And what do you think about the modem?

R: It gets warm! It’s fine – to me, the point of the modem is literally to give me the connection to the internet, and it does that very well. I use it with a Netgear router internally for my network.

BE are the only ISP to offer line bonding In the UK and worldwide it’s only handful, so it’s a very niche product. At the level you’re doing it at I wouldn’t say we’re quite at the mass market level where I’d give it to my gran, but we’re getting a lot closer. We’re getting away from fiddling with the router settings to get extra speeds, which is good to hear.

T: Great, it’s good to hear. Richard, thanks for being a customer and thanks for being the first one to use our line bonding product!