Be Broadband

We asked you, in the recent newsletter, to submit your best broadband related tips to help your fellow members make the most of their BE connection. We had a great response and noticed a tonne of awesome tips, some we’d heard of and some that were completely new to us. There were too many for just one post, so look out for more BE member How-To tips coming soon.

Here’s the first bunch:

Wired BE member John advises:

Check your house wiring, remove sockets and wiring that you no longer use, and make sure your connections are properly made and secure. Check for any short circuits inside sockets. Always connect your router to your master socket. If necessary ask BT, or an approved contractor, to move your master socket. The cheap extension socket kits sold on the high street are often of poor quality, so source your wiring from a specialist electrical shop and choose high quality branded accessories. For only a few pounds more you will get a noticeably better, faster and more reliable broadband connection.

Efficient advice from BE member Axel :

Remove any start up apps or automatic updates from your computer – unless needed. These things use bandwidth for no reason if you do not need them. For example: webcam software, any toolbars, etc. But there are exceptions, such as Windows update, firewalls and antivirus software.

Port savvy advice from BE member Richard:

Use port forwarding if your router allows it. This helps a lot with traffic management to your various connected devices. For example, it lets you host a game on one machine, but leave the other for daily tasks.

Sound advice from BE member Ross:

Visit the forum for advice on your line and whether you can improve it.

BE member Stephen lists his favourite tools for checking his connection:

'192' added as a search option in Chrome and Launchy to point to http://192.168.1.254/cgi/b/dsl/dt/?be=0&l0=1&l1=0, so I can quickly see if there is something basic amiss.
DMT (http://192.168.1.254/cgi/b/dsl/dt/?be=0&l0=1&l1=0) to check more details of the connection.
f8lure (http://192.168.1.254/cgi/b/dsl/dt/?be=0&l0=1&l1=0) to monitor if my connection has oddities.
Tone (http://adsl.tin2tin.net) for more details and logging than DMT, and for quick access to f8lure graphs.
NetLimiter (free version http://www.netlimiter.com/download.php) to check net speeds and traffic volumes of different programs.
Inssider (http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider/) to sort out any wireless network issues.
DNSBench (http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm) to check out which nameservers are best for me.
Launchy (www.launchy.net). not specifically for broadband, but this is the one I use almost all the time ...to make it easier to access all those programs above, and all other programs and websites as well.

BE member Colin says:

For my Be broadband connection I have a static IP address. This is a free option with BE and really something that you may want to consider. It gives me an extremely useful advantage. The static IP address means that I can route traffic through my firewall and serve content stored locally out to the internet.

Parenting advice from BE member Ken:

Manage who uses the (wonderfully high) bandwidth with custom firmware - DD-WRT – in a Linksys router. As well as giving more control and features, one of the best options are Access profiles and QOS. Access profiles allow a parent to restrict the time their little angels teenagers spend online. While QOS allows parents to restrict the bandwidth their little angels teenagers have - it puts them off downloading too many things they shouldn't.

Hot advice from BE member Steve: